AMONG MY BOOKS. 



It 



7 



as^z 



BY 



JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL, A.M, 

PROFESSOR OF BELLES-LETTRES IN HARVARD COLLEGE. 





BOSTON: 
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO, 

1870. 



au. j^ 



T"^ 



t 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 18T0, by 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 

ia the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



Untversity Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge. 



To F. D. L. 



Love comes and goes with music in his feet, 
And tianes young pulses to his roundelays ; 

Love brings thee this : will it persuade thee, Sweet, 
That he turns proser when he comes and stays? 



CONTENTS. 

♦— 

Page 

Dryden 1 

Witchcraft . 81 

Shakespeare Once More 151 

New England Two Centuries Ago . . . 228 

Lessing 291 

Rousseau and the Sentimentalists . . . 349 






DRYDEN.* 



Benvenuto Cellini tells us that when, in his boy- 
hood, he saw a salamander come out of the fire, his 
grandfather forthwith gave him a sound beating, that he 
might the better remember so unique a prodigy. Though 
perhaps in this case the rod had another application 
than the autobiographer chooses to disclose, and was 
intended to fix in the pupil's mind a lesson of veracity 
rather than of science, the testimony to its mnemonic 
virtue remains. Nay, so universally was it once believed 
that the senses, and through them the faculties of obser- 
vation and retention, were quickened by an irritation of 
the cuticle, that in France it was customary to whip the 
children annually at the boundaries of the parish, lest 
the true place of them might ever be lost through neg- 
lect of so inexpensive a mordant for the memory. From 
this practice the older school of critics would seem to 

* The Dramatick Works of Joiix Dryden, Esq. In six volumes. 
London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, in the Strand. MDCCXXXV. 
18mo. 

The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose-Works of John Dryden, now 
first collected. With Notes and Illustrations. An Account of the Life 
and Writings of the Author, grounded on Original and Authentick Docu- 
ments; and a Collection of his Letters, the greatest Part of which has 
never before been published. By Edmund Malone, Esq. London: 
T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand. 4 vols. 8vo. 

The Poetical Works of John Dryden. (Edited by Mitford.) 
London: W. Pickering. 1832. 5 vols. 18mo. 

1 A 



2 DRYDEN. 

have taken a hint for keeping fixed the hmits of good 
taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called classical 
English. To mark these limits in poetry, they set up 
as Hermae the images they had made to them of Dry den, 
of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly 
castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn per- 
formed the same function for the next generation, thus 
helping to keep always sacred and immovable the ne 2>lus 
ultra alike of inspiration and of the vocabulary. Though 
no two natures were ever much more unlike than those 
of Dryden and Pope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, 
and no two styles, except in such externals as could be 
easily caught and copied, yet it was the fashion, down 
even to the last generation, to advise young writers to 
form themselves, as it was called, on these excellent 
models. Wordsworth him.self began in this school ; and 
though there were glimpses, here and there, of a direct 
study of nature, yet most of the epithets in his earlier 
pieces were of the traditional kind so fatal to poetry dur- 
ing great part of the last century ; and he indulged in 
that alphabetic personification which enlivens all such 
words as Hunger, Solitude, Freedom, by the easy magic 
of an initial capital. 

" Where the green apple shrivels on the spray, 
And pines the nnripened pear in snmmer's kindliest ray, 
Even hei-e Content has fixed her smiling reign 
With Independence, child of high Disdain. 
Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies, 
Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies. 
And often gi-asps her sword, and often eyes." 

Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, 
even to the triplet, which Swift hated so heartily as " a 
vicious way of rhyming wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, 
imitated by all the bad versifiers of Charles the Second's 
reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, very early the 
leader of reform ; but, like Wesley, he endeavored a re- 



DRYDEN. 3 

form within the Establishment. Purifying the substance, 
he retained the outward forms with a feehng rather than 
conviction that, in poetry, substance and form are but 
manifestations of the same inward life, the one fused 
into the other in the vivid heat of their common expres- 
sion. AVordsworth could never wholly shake off the in- 
fluence of the century into which he was born. Ho 
began by proposing a reform of the ritual, but it went 
no further than an attempt to get rid of the words of 
Latin original where the meaning was as well or better 
given in derivatives of the Saxon. He would have 
stricken out the "assemble" and left the ''meet to- 
gether." Like Wesle}^, he might be compelled by neces- 
sity to a breach of the canon ; but, like him, he was 
never a willing schismatic, and his singing robes were 
the full and flowing canonicals of the church by law 
established. Inspiration makes short work with the 
usage of the best authors and ready-made elegances of 
diction ; but where Wordsworth is not possessed by hia 
demon, as Moliere said of Corneille, he equals Thomson 
in verbiage, out-Miltons Milton in artifice of style, and 
Latinizes his diction beyond Dryden. The fact was, that 
he took up his early opinions on instinct, and insensibly 
modified them as he studied the masters of what may 
be called the Middle Period of En^-lish verse.* As a 
young man, he disparaged Virgil (" We talked a great 
deal of nonsense in those days," he said when taken to 
task for it later in life) ; at fifty-nine he translated three 
books of the ^neid, in emulation of Dryden, though 
falling far short of him in everything but closeness, as 
he seems, after a few years, to have been convinced. 
Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true 
founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Eliza- 

* His " Character of a Happy "Warrior " (1806), one of liis noblest 
poems, has a dash of Dryden in it, — still more his "Epistle to Sir 
George Beaumont (1811)." 



4 DRYDEN. 

"bethan authority save Milton, whose own Enghsh was 

formed upon those earher models. Keats denounced the 

authors of that style which came in toward the close of 

the seventeenth century, and reigned absolute through 

the whole of the eighteenth, as 

" A schism, 
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, 
who went about 
Holding a poor decrepit standard out. 
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large 
The name of one Boileau! " 

But Keats had never then* studied the writers of whom 
he speaks so contemptuously, though he might have 
profited by so doing. Boileau would at least have 
taught him that flimsy would have been an apter epithet 
for the standard than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden 
was the author of that schism against which Keats so ve- 
hemently asserts the claim of the orthodox teaching it 
had disj^laced. He was far more just to Boileau, of 
whom Keats had probably never read a word. " If I 
would only cross the seas," he says, " I might find in 
France a living Horace and a Juvenal in the person of 
the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, 
whose expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, 
whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed, and 
whose sense is just. What he bori'ows from the an- 
cients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good 
and almost as universally valuable." f 

Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred 
and seventy years ; in the second class of English poets 
perhaps no one stands, on the whole, so high as he ; 
during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy, detraction, un- 
popular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his 
pre-eminence was conceded; he was the earliest com- 

* He studied Dryden's versification before writing his " Lamia." 
■f On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson's counter 
opinion in his life of Diyden. 



DRYDEN. 5 

plete type of the purely literary man, in the modern 
sense ; there is a singular unanimity in allowing him a 
certain claim to greatness which would be denied to men 
as famous and more read, — to Pope or Swift, for exam- 
ple ; he is supposed, in some way or other, to have re- 
formed English poetry. It is now about half a centmy 
since the only uniform edition of his works was edited 
by Scott. No library is complete without him, no name 
is more familiar than his, and yet it may be suspected 
that few writers are more thoroughly buried in that 
great cemetery of the " British Poets." If contempo- 
rary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous fame may 
be generally trusted, for it is a verdict made up of the 
suffrages of the select men in succeeding generations. 
This verdict has been as good as unanimous in favor of 
Dryden. It is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh ob- 
servation of him, to consider him neither as warning 
nor example, but to endeavor to make out what it is 
that has given so lofty and firm a position to one of the 
most unequal, inconsistent, and faulty writers that ever 
lived. He is a curious example of what we often re- 
mark of the living, but rarely of the dead, — that they 
get credit for what they might be quite as much as for 
what they are, — and posterity has applied to him one 
of his own rules of criticism, judging him by the best 
rather than the average of his achievement, a thing pos- 
terity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side in poli- 
tics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's, — - 
whom in many respects he resembles, and especially in 
that supreme quality of a reasoner, that his mind gath- 
ers not only heat, but clearness and expansion, by its 
own motion, — that they have won his battle for him in 
the judgment of after times. 

To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a 
singularly interesting and even picturesque figm-e. He 



6 DRYDEN. 

is, in more senses than one, in language, in turn of 
thought, in style of mind, in the direction of his activ- 
ity, the first of the moderns. He is the first literary 
man who was also a man of the world, as we under- 
stand the term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as the ac- 
knowledged dictator of wit and criticism, as Dr. Johnson, 
after nearly the same interval, succeeded him. All ages 
are, in some sense, ages of transition ; but there are times 
w^hen the transition is more marked, more rapid ; and it 
is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arrive 
at maturity during such a period, still more to represent 
in himself the change that is going on, and to be an 
efficient cause in bringing it about. Unless, like Goethe, 
he is of a singularly uncontemporaneous nature, caj^able 
of being tutta in se romita, and of running parallel with 
his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will 
be thwarted in that harmonious development of native 
force which has so much to do w^ith its steady and suc- 
cessful application. Dryden suff'ered, no doubt, in this 
way. Though in creed he seems to have drifted back- 
ward in an eddy of the general cuiTcnt ; yet of the in- 
tellectual movement of the time, so far certainly as 
literatm-e shared in it, he could say, wuth ^neas, not 
only that he saw, but that himself was a gi'eat part of 
it. That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, 
from faith to scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, 
from the imagination to the understanding. It was in 
a direction altogether away from those springs of imagi- 
nation and faith at which they of the last age had slaked 
the thirst or renewed the vigor of their souls. Dryden 
himself recognized that indefinable and gregarious in- 
fluence which we call nowadays the Spirit of the Age, 
when he said that " every Age has a kind of universal 
Genius." * He had also a just notion of that in which 
* Essaj' ou Dramatick Poesy. 



DRYDEN. 7 

he lived; for he remarks, incidentally, that "all know- 
ing ages are naturally sceptic and not at all bigoted, 
which, if I am not much deceived, is the proper charac- 
ter of our own." * It may be conceived that he was 
even painfully half-aware of having fallen upon a time 
incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of 
any poet at all ; for nothing is so sensitive to the chill 
of a sceptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm which, if 
it be not genius, is at least the beautiful illusion that 
saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. 
Thrice unhappy he who, born to see things as they 
might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as 
people say they are, — to read God in a prose translation. 
Such was Dryden's lot. and such, for a good part of his 
days, it was by his own choice. He who was of a stat- 
ure to snatch the torch of life that flashes from lifted 
hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of 
inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews. 
As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and 
repeatedly reaffirmed the maxim that 

" He who lives to please, must please to live." 

"Without earnest convictions, no great or sound literature 
is conceivable. But if Dryden mostly wanted that in- 
spiration which comes of belief in and devotion to 
something nobler and more abiding than the present 
moment and its petulant need, he had, at least, the next 
best thing to that, — a thorough faith in himself He 
was, moreover, a man of singularly open soul, and of a 
temper self-confident enough to be candid even with 
himself. His mind was growing to the last, his judg- 
ment widening and deepening, his artistic sense refining 
itself more and more. He confessed his errors, and was 
not ashamed to retrace his steps in search of that bet- 

* Life of Lucian. 



8 DRYDEN. 

ter knowledge which the omniscience of superficial study 
. had disparaged. Surely an intellect that is still pliable 
^ at seventy is a phenomenon as interesting as it is rare. 
But at whatever period of his life we look at Dryden, 
and whatever, for the moment, may have been his poetic 
creed, there was something in the nature of the man 
that would not be wholly subdued to what it worked in. 
There are continual glimpses of something in him great- 
er than he, hints of possibilities finer than anything he 
has done. You feel that the whole of him was better 
than any random specimens, though of his best, seem to 
prove. Incessu 2>cUet, he has by times the large stride 
of the elder race, though it sinks too often into the 
slouch of a man who has seen better days. His grand 
air may, in part, spring from a habit of easy superiority 
to his competitors ; but must also, in part, be ascribed 
to an innate dignity of character. That this pre-emi- 
nence should have been so generally admitted, during 
his life, can only be explained by a bottom of good 
sense, kindliness, and sound judgment, whose solid 
worth could afford that many a flurry of vanity, petu- 
lance, and even error should flit across the surface and 
be forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have been, 
the last and abiding impression of him is, that he was 
thoroughly manly ; and while it may be disputed wheth- 
er he was a great poet, it may be said of him, as Words- 
worth said of Burke, that " he was by far the greatest 
man of his age, not only abounding in knowledge him- 
self, but feeding, in various directions, his most able con- 
temporaries." * 

Dryden was born in 1631. He was accordingly six 
years old when Jonson died, was nearly a quarter of 
a century younger than Milton, and may have personally 

* " The great man must have that intellect which puts in motion 
tlie intellect of others." — Landor, Im. Con., Diogenes and Plato. 



DRYDEN. 9 

known Bishop Hall, the first English satirist, who was 
living till 1656. On the other side, he was older than 
Swift by thirty-six, than Addison by forty-one, and than 
Pope by fifty-seven years. Dennis says that " Dryden, 
for the last ten years of his life, was much acquainted 
with Addison, and drank with him more than he ever 
used to do, probably so far as to hasten his end," being 
commonly " an extreme sober man." Pope tells us that, 
in his twelfth year, he " saw Dryden," perhaps at Will's, 
perhaps in the street, as Scott did Burns. Dryden him- 
self visited Milton now and then, and was intimate with 
Davenant, who could tell him of Fletcher and Jonson 
from personal recollection. Thus he stands between the 
age before and that which followed him, giving a hand 
to each. His father was a country clergyman, of Puri- 
tan leanings, a younger son of an ancient county family. 
The Puritanism is thought to have come in with the 
poet's great-grandfather, who made in his will the some- 
what singular statement that he was "assured by the Holy 
Ghost that he was elect of God." It would appear from 
this that Dryden's self-confidence was an inheritance. 
The solid quality of his mind showed itself early. He him- 
self tells us that he had read Polybius " in English, with 
the pleasure of a boy, before he was ten years of age, and 
yet even then had some dark notions of the prudence ivith 
which he conducted his design." * The concluding words 
are very characteristic, even if Dryden, as men common- 
ly do, interpreted his boyish turn of mind by later self- 
knowledge. We thus get a glimpse of him browsing 
— for, like Johnson, Burke, and the full as distin- 
guished from the learned men, he was always a random 
reader f — in his father's library, and painfully culJing 

* Characterof Polybius (1692). 

t " Fox- my own part, who must confess it to my shame that I never 
read anything but for pleasure." Life of Plutarch (1683). 
1* 



10 ' DRYDEN. 

here and there a spray of his own proper nutriment 
from among the stubs and thorns of Piu'itan divinity. 
After such schoohng as could be had in the country, 
he was sent up to Westminster School, then under the 
headship of the celebrated Dr. Busby. Here he made 
his first essays in verse, translating, among other school 
exercises of the same kind, the third satire of Persius. 
In 1650 he was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, 
and remained there for seven years. The only record 
of his college life is a discipline imposed, in 1G52, for 
"disobedience to the Vice-Master, and contumacy in 
taking his punishment, inflicted by him." Whether this 
punishment was corporeal, as Johnson insinuates in the 
similar case of Milton, we are ignorant. He certainly 
retained no very fond recollection of his Alma Mater, for 
in his " Prologue to the University of Oxford " he says : — • 

" Oxford to him a dearer name shall be 
Than his own mother univex'sity; 
Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, 
He chooses Athens in his riper age." 

By the death of his father, in 1654, he came into pos- 
session of a small estate of sixty pounds a year, from 
which, however, a third must be deducted, for his moth- 
er's dower, till 1676. After leaving Cambridge, he be- 
came secretary to his near relative. Sir Gilbert Pickering, 
at that time Cromwell's chamberlain, and a member of 
his Upper House. In 1670 he succeeded Davenant as 
Poet Laureate,* and Howell as Historiographer, with a 
yearly salary of two hundred pounds. This place he 
lost at the Ptevolution, and had the mortification to see 
his old enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, as the 
best poet the Whig party could muster. If William was 

* Gray says petulantly enough that " Dryden was as disgraceful to 
the office, from his character, as tlie poorest scribbler could have 
been from his verses." — Gkay toJLvsoN, 19th December, 1757. 



DRYDEN. 11 

obliged to read the verses of his official minstrel, Drydcn 
was more than avenged. From 1G88 to his death, 
twelve years later, he earned his bread manfully by liis 
pen, without any mean complaining, and with no allu- 
sion to his fallen fortunes that is not dignified and 
touching. These latter years, during which he was his 
own man again, were probably the hapjoiest of his life. 
In 1664: or 1665 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, 
daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. About a hundred 
pounds a year were thus added to his income. The 
marriage is said not to have been a happy one, and per- 
haps it was not, for his wife was apparently a weak- 
minded woman ; but the inference from the internal evi- 
dence of Dryden's plays, as of Shakespeare's, is very 
untrustworthy, ridicule of marriage having always been 
a common stock in trade of the comic writers. 

The earliest of his verses that have come down to us 
were written upon the death of Lord Hastings, and are 
as bad as they can be, — a kind of parody on the worst 
of Donne. They have every fault of his manner, with- 
out a hint of the subtile and often profound thought 
that more than redeems it. As the Doctor himself 
would have said, here is Donne outdone. The young 
nobleman died of the small-pox, and Dryden exclaims 
pathetically, — 

" Was there no milder way than the small-pox, 
The very filthmess of Pandora's box? " 

He compares the pustules to " rosebuds stuck i' the 
lily skin about," and says that 

" Each little pimple had a tear in it 
To wail the fault its rising did commit." 

But he has not done his worst yet, by a great deal. 

What follows is even finer : — 

" No comet need foretell his change drew on, 
Whose corpse might seem a constellation. 



12 DEYDEN. 

0, had he died of old, how gi-eat a strife 

Had been who from his death should draw their life ! 

Who should, by one rich draught, become whatever 

Seneca, Cato, Numa, Casar, were, 

Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this 

An universal metempsychosis ! 

JIust all these aged sires in one funeral 

Expire V all die in one so young, so small ? " 

It is said that one of Allston's early pictures was 
brought to him, after he had long forgotten it, and his 
opinion asked as to the wisdom of the young artist's per- 
severing in the career he had chosen. Allston advised 
his quitting it forthwith as hopeless. Could the same 
experiment have been tried with these verses upon Dry- 
den, can any one doubt that his counsel would have 
been the same 1 It should be remembered, however, 
that he was barely turned eighteen when they were 
written, and the tendency of his style is noticeable in so 
early an abandonment of the participial ed in lecuiied and 
aged. In the next year he appears again in some 
commendatory verses prefixed to the sacred epigrams of 
his friend, John Hoddesdon. In these he speaks of the 
author as a 

" Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook, 
So lofty and divine a course hast took 
As all admire, before the down begin 
To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin." 

Here is almost every fault which Dryden's later 
nicety would have condemned. But perhaps there is 
no schooling so good for an author as his own youthfid 
indiscretions. After this effort Dryden seems to have 
lain fallow for ten years, and then he at length reappears 
in thirty-seven " heroic stanzas " on the death of Crom- 
well. The versification is smoother, but the conceits 
are there again, though in a milder form. The verse is 
modelled after " Gondibert." A single image from na- 



DRYDEN. 13 

ture (he was almost always happy in these) gives some 
hint of the maturer Dryden : — 

" And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, 
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow.'' 

Two other verses, 

" And the isle, when her protecting genius went, 
Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred," 

are interesting, because they show that he had been 

studying the early poems of Milton. He has contrived 

to bury under a rubbish of verbiage one of the most 

purely imaginative passages ever written by the gi'eat 

Puritan poet. 

*' From haunted spring and dale, 
Edged with poplar pale. 
The parting genius is with sighing sent." 

This is the more curious because, twenty-four years after- 
wards, he says, in defending rhyme : " Whatever causes 
he [Milton] alleges for the abolishment of rhyme, his own 
particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his 
talent ; he had neither the ease of doing it nor the 
graces of it : which is manifest in his Juvenilia, .... 
where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and 
comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most 
pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man 
a rhymer, though not a poet."* It was this, no doubt, 
that heartened Dr. Johnson to say of " Lycidas " that 
" the diction was harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the 
numbers unpleasing." It is Dryden's excuse that his 
characteristic excellence is to argue persuasively and 
powerfully, whether in verse or prose, and that he was 
amply endowed with the most needful quality of an 
advocate, — to be always strongly and wholly of his 
present w^ay of thinking, whatever it might be. Next 

* Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire. 



14 DRYDEN. 

we have, in 16G0, " Astreea Redux " on the " happy res- 
toration " of Charles 11. In this also we can forebode 
little of the full-gro^sTQ Dryden but his defects. We see 
his tendency to exaggeration, and to confound physical 
with metaphysical, as where he says of the ships that 
brought home the royal brothers, that 

" The joyful London meets 
The princely York, himself alone a freight, 
The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight 

and speaks of the 

" Repeated prayer 
Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence." 

There is also a certain everydayness, not to say vul- 
garity, of phrase, which Dryden never wholly refined 
away, and which continually tempts us to sum up at 
once against him as the greatest poet that ever was or 
could be made wholly out of prose. 

*' Heaven "would no bargain for its blessings drivte " 

is an example. On the other hand, there are a few 
verses almost worthy of his best days, as these : — 

" Some lazy ages lost in sleep and ease, 
No action leave to busy chronicles; 
Such whose supine felicity but makes 
In story chasms, in epochas mistakes, 
f^ O'er Avhom Time gently shakes his Avings of doANTi, 
Till with his silent sickle they are mown." 

These are all the more noteworthy, that Dryden, un- 
less in argument, is seldom equal for six lines together. 
In the poem to Lord Clarendon (1662) there are four 
verses that have something of the " energy divine " for 
which Pope praised his master. 

" Let envy, then, those crimes within you see 
From which the happy never must be free ; 
Envy that does with misery reside, 
The joy and the revenge of ruined pride." 



DRYDEN. 15 

In his "Aurengzebe" (1675) there is a passage, of 
which, as it is a good example of Dryden, I shall quote 
the whole, though my purpose aims mainly at the latter 
verses : — 

" When I consider life, 't is all a cheat; 
Yet, fooled with Hope, men favor the deceit, 
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay; 
To-morrow 's falser than the former day, 
Lies worse, and, while it says Ave shall be blest 
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. 
Strange cozenage ! none would live past years again, 
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain. 
And from the dregs of life think to receive 
What the first sprightly running could not give. 
I 'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold 
Which fools us young and beggars us when old." 

The " first sprightly running " of Dryden's vintage 
was, it must be confessed, a little muddy, if not beery ; 
but if his own soil did not produce grapes of the choicest 
flavor, he knew where they were to be had ; and his 
product, like sound wine, grew better the longer it stood 
upon the lees. He tells us, evidently thinking of him- 
self, that in a poet, " from fifty to threescore, the bal- 
ance generally holds even in our colder climates, for he 
loses not much in fancy, and judgment, which is the ef- 
fect of observation, still increases. His succeeding years 
afford him little more than the stubble of his own har- 
vest, yet, if his constitution be healthful, his mind may 
still retain a decent vigor, and the gleanings of that of 
Ephraim, in comparison with others, will surpass the 
vintage of Abiezer." * Since Chaucer, none of our poets 
has had a constitution more healthful, and it was his old 
age that yielded the best of him. In him the under- 
standing was, perhaps, in overplus for his entire good 
fortune as a poet, and that is a faculty among the earli- 

* Dedication of the Georgics. 



16 DRYDEN. 

est to mature. "We have seen him, at only ten years, di- 
vining the power of reason in Polybius.'*' The same turn 
of mind led him later to imitate the French school of 
tragedy, and to admire in Ben Jonson the most correct 
of English poets. It was his imagination that needed 
quickening, and it is very curious to trace through his 
different prefaces the gradual opening of his eyes to the 
causes of the solitary pre-eminence of Shakespeare. At 
first he is sensible of an attraction towards him which 
he cannot explain, and for which he apologizes, as if it 
were wrong. But he feels himself drawn more and more 
strongly, till at last he ceases to resist altogether, and 
is forced to acknowledge that there is something in this 
one man that is not and never was anywhere else, some- 
thing not to be reasoned about, ineffable, divine ; if con- 
trary to the rules, so much the worse for them. It may 
be conjectured that Dryden's Puritan associations may 
have stood in the way of his more properly poetic cul- 
ture, and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare was 
slight. He tells us that Davenant, whom he could not 
have known before he himself was twenty-seven, first 
taught him to admire the great poet. But even after 
his imagination had become conscious of its prerogative, 
and his expression had been ennobled by frequenting 
this higher society, we find him continually dropping 
back into that sermo pedestris which seems, on the whole, 
to have been his more natural element. "We always feel 
his epoch in him, that he was the lock which let our lan- 
guage down from its point of highest poetry to its level 
of easiest and most gently flowing prose. His enthusiasm 
needs the contagion of other minds to arouse it ; but his 
strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit, 

* Dryden's penetration is always remarkable. Hts general judg- 
ment of Polybius coincides remarkably with that of Mommsea. (Rom. 
Gesch. II. 448, seq.) 



DRYDEN. 17 

which is distinguished by a certain breadth and, as it 
were, power of generahzation, as Pope's by keenness of 
edge and point, were his, whether he would or no. Ac- 
cordingly, his poetry is often best and his verse more 
flowing where (as in parts of his version of the twenty- 
ninth ode of the third book of Horace) he is amplifying 
the suggestions of another mind.* Viewed from one 
side, he justifies Milton's remark of him, that " he was 
a good rhymist, but no poet." To look at all sides, and 
to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no doubt, the 
duty of a critic? But how if a certain side be so often 
presented as to thrust forward in the memory and dis- 
turb it in the effort to recall that total impression (for 
the office of a critic is not, though often so misunder- 
stood, to say guilty or not guilty of some particular fact) 
which is the only safe ground of judgment % It is the 
weight of the whole man, not of one or the other limb of 
him, that we want. Expende Hannihalem. Very good, 
but not in a scale capacious only of a single quality at a 
time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that 
assures the value of each separately. It was not this or 
that which gave him his w^eight in council, his swiftness 
of decision in battle that outran the forethought of 
other men, — it was Hannibal. But this prosaic ele- 
ment in Dry den will force itself upon me. As I read 
him, I cannot help thinking of an ostrich, to be classed 
with flying things, and capable, what with leap and flap 
together, of leaving the earth for a longer or shorter 
space, but loving the open plain, where wing and foot 
help each other to something that is both flight and run 
at once. What with his haste and a certain dash, w^hich, 

* "I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English." 
Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it " was better than the 
original." J. C. Scaliger said of Erasmus: " Ex alieno ingenio poeta, 
ex sue versificator." 

B 



18 DKYDEN. 

according to our mood, we may call florid or splendid, he 
seems to stand among poets where Kubens does among 
painters, — greater, perhaps, as a colorist than an artist, 
yet great here also, if we compare him with any but the 
first. 

We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second year, and 
thus far have found little in him to warrant an augury 
that he was ever to be one of the great names in English 
literature, the most perfect type, that is, of his class, and 
that class a high one, though not the highest. If Joseph 
de Maistre's axiom, Qiti n^a pas vaincu a trente ans, ne 
vainer a jamais, were true, there would be little hope of 
him, for he has won no battle yet. But there is some- 
thing solid and doughty in the man, that can rise from 
defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, 
when we are able to choose our position better, and the 
sun is at our back. Hitherto his performances have 
been mainly of the ohhligato sort, at which few men 
of original force are good, least of all Dryden, who had 
always something of stiffness in his strength. Waller 
had praised the living Cromwell in perhaps the manliest 
verses he ever wrote, — not very manly, to be sure, but 
really elegant, and, on the whole, better than those in 
which Dryden squeezed out melodious tears. Waller, 
who had also made himself conspicuous as a volunteer 
Antony to the country squire turned Csesar, 

(" With ermine clad and purple, let him hold 
A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold,") 

was more servile than Dryden in hailing the return of 

ex officio Majesty. He bewails to Charles, in snuffling 

heroics, 

" Our sorrow and our crime 
To have accepted life so long a time, 
Without you here." 

A weak man, put to the test by rough and angry times, 



DEYDEN. 19 

as Waller was, may be pitied, but meanness is nothing 
but contemptible under any circumstances. If it be true 
that '' every conqueror creates a Muse," Cromwell was 
unfortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though dignified, is 
reserved if not distrustful. Marvell's " Horatian Ode," 
the most truly classic in our language, is worthy of its 
theme. The same poet's Elegy, in parts noble, and 
everywhere humanly tender, is worth more than all Car- 
lyle's biography as a witness to the gentler qualities of 
the hero, and of the deep affection that stalwart nature 
could inspire in hearts of truly masculine temper. As it 
is little known, a few verses of it may be quoted to show 
the difference between grief that thinks of its object and 
grief that thinks of its rhymes : — 

" Valor, religion, friendship, prudence died 
At once with him, and all that 's good beside, 
And we, death's refuse, nature's dregs, confined 
To loathsome life, alas ! are left behind. 
Where we (so once we used) shall now no more, 
To fetch day, press about his chamber-door, 
No more shall hear that poAverful language charm, 
Whose force oft spared the labor of his arm. 
No more shall follow where he spent the days 
In war or counsel, or in prayer and praise. 

I saw him dead; a leaden slumber lies, 

And mortal sleep, over those wakeful eyes ; 

Those gentle rays under the lids were fled. 

Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed; 

That port, which so majestic was and strong. 

Loose and deprived of vigor stretched along, 

All withered, all discolored, pale, and wan, 

How much another thing ! no more That Man ! 

human glory ! vain ! death ! wings ! 

worthless world ! transitory things! 

Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed 
That still, though dead, greater than Death he laid, 
And, in his altered face, you something feign 

1 hat threatens Death he yet will live again." 

Such verses might not satisfy Lindley Murray, but 



20 DRYDEN. 

they are of that higher mood which satisfies the heart. 

These couplets, too, have an energy "^'orthy of Milton's 

friend : — 

" When up the armed mountains of Dunbar 
He marched, and through deep Severn, ending -war." 

" Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse 
Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse." 

On the whole, one is glad that Dryden's panegyric on 
the Protector was so poor. It was purely official verse- 
making. Had there been any feeling in it, there had 
been baseness in his address to Charles. As it is, we 
may fairly assume that he was so far sincere in both 
cases as to be thankful for a chance to exercise himself 
in rhyme, without much caring whether upon a funeral 
or a restoration. He might naturally enough expect 
that poetry would have a better chance under Charles 
than under Cromwell, or any successor with Common- 
wealth principles. Cromwell had more serious matters 
to think about than verses, while Charles might at least 
care as much about them as it was in his base good- 
nature to care about anything but loose women and 
spaniels. Dryden's sound sense, afterwards so conspicu- 
ous, shows itself even in these pieces, when we can -get 
at it through the tangled thicket of tropical phrase. 
But the authentic and unmistakable Dryden first mani- 
fests himself in some verses addressed to his friend Dr. 
Charlton in 16G3. We have first his common sense, 
which has almost the point of wit, yet with a tang of 
prose : — 

" The longest tyranny that ever swayed 
Was that wherein oiir ancestors betrayed 
Their freeborn reason to the Stagyrite, 
And made his torch their universal light. 
So truth, while only one supplied the state, 
Grew scarce and dear and yet sophisticate. 
Still it teas bought, like ew^p'7■^c loares or charms, 
Hard words sealed up with Aristotle's arms.'' 



DRYDEN. 21 

Then we have his graceful sweetness of fancy, where he 
speaks of the inhabitants of the New World : — 

" Guiltless men who danced away their time, 
Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime." 

And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where 
"mighty visions of the Danish race" watch round 
Charles sheltered in Stonehenge after the battle of 
"Worcester. These passages might have been written by 
the Dryden whom we learn to know fifteen years later. 
They have the advantage that he wrote them to please 
himself His contemporary, Dr. Heylin, said of French 
cooks, that " their trade was not to feed the belly, but 
the palate." Dryden was a great while in learning this 
secret, as available in good writing as in cookery. He 
strove after it, but his thoroughly English nature, to the 
last, would too easily content itself with serving up the 
honest beef of his thought, without regard to daintiness 
of flavor in the dressing of it.* Of the best English\ 
poetry, it might be said that it is understanding aerated/ 
by imagination. In Dryden the solid part too often re- " 
fused to mix kindly with the leaven, either remaining 
lumpish or rising to a hasty puffiness. Grace and light- 
ness were with him much more a laborious achievement 
than a natural gift, and it is all the more remarkable 
that he should so often have attained to what seems 
such an easy perfection in both. Always a hasty 

* In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin Mrs. "*\ 
Steward for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says: " A chine of honest 
bacon would please my appetite more than all the marrow-puddings ; 
for I like them better plain, having a very ^nilgar stomach." So of 
Cowley he says : " There was plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole p\Ta- 
mids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for 
men." The physical is a truer antit}-pe of the spiritual man than vtq 
are willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge the 
inconvenient country-cousinship of the stomach. 



22 DRYDEN. 



n 



writer,* he was long in forming his style, and to the 
last was apt to snatch the readiest word rather than 
wait for the fittest. He was not wholly and uncon- 
sciously poet, but a thinker who sometimes lost himself 
on enchanted ground and was transfigured by its touch. 
This preponderance in him of the reasoning over the in- 
tuitive faculties, the one always there, the other flashing 
in when you least expect it, accounts for that inequality 
and even incongruousness in his writing which makes 
one revise his judgment at every tenth page. In his 
prose you come upon passages that jDersuade you he is 
a poet, in spite of his verses so often turning state's evi- 
dence against him as to convince you he is none. He 
is a prose-writer, with a kind of JEolian attachment. For 
example, take this bit of prose from the dedication of 
his version of Virgil's Pastorals, 1G94 : "He found the 
strength of his genius betimes, and was even in his 
youth preluding to his Georgicks and his JEneis. He 
could not forbear to try his wings, though his jDinions 
were not hardened to maintain a long, laborious flight ; 
yet sometimes they bore him to a pitch as lofty as ever 
he was able to reach afterwards. But when he was ad- 
monished by his subject to descend, he came down gen- 
tly circling in the air and singing to the ground, like a 
lark melodious in her mounting and continuing her song 
till she alights, still preparing for a higher flight at her 
next sally, and tuning her voice to better music." This 
is charming, and yet even this wants the ethereal tinc- 
ture that pervades the style of Jeremy Taylor, making 

* In his preface to " All for Love," he says, evidently alluding to 
himself: " If he have a friend whose hastiness in writing is his great- 
est fault, Horace would have taught liim to have minced the matter, 
and to have called it readiness of thought and a floAving fancy." And 
in the Preface to the Fables he says of Homer: " This vehemence of 
his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper." He makes other allu- 
sions to it. 



DRYDEN. 23 

it, as Burke said of Sheridan's eloquence, " neither prose 
nor poetry, but something better than either." Let us 
compare Taylor's treatment of the same image : "For 
so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass and 
soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get 
to heaven and climb above the clouds ; but the poor 
bird was beaten back by the loud sighings of an eastern 
wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, 
descending more at every breath of the tempest than 
it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing 
of his wings, till the little creature was forced to sit 
down and pant, and stay till the storm was over, and 
then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing 
as if it had learned music and motion of an angel as 
he passed sometimes through the air about his minis- 
tries here below." Taylor's fault is that his sentences 
too often smell of the library, but what an open air is 
here ! How unpremeditated it all seems ! How care- 
lessly he knots each new thought, as it comes, to the 
one before it with an and, like a girl making lace ! 
And what a slidingly musical use he makes of the sibi- 
lants with which our language is unjustly taxed by 
those who can only make them hiss, not sing ! There 
are twelve of them in the first twenty words, fifteen of 
which are monsyllables. We notice the structure of 
Dryden's periods, but this grows up as we read. It 
gushes, like the song of the bird itself, — 

"In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." 

Let us now take a specimen of Dryden's bad prose from 
one of his poems. I open the " Annus Mirabihs " at 
random, and hit upon this : — 

" Our little fleet was now engaged so far, 
That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought: 
The combat only seemed a civil war. 
Till through their bowels we our passage wrought." 



24: DKYDEN. 

Is this Drjden, or Sternhold, or Shad well, those Toms 
who made him say that '' dulness was fatal to the name 
of Tom " *? The natural history of Goldsmith in the 
verse of Pje ! His thoughts did not " voluntary move 
harmonious numbers." He had his choice between j)rose 
and verse, and seems to be poetical on second thought. 
I do not speak without book. He was more than half 
conscious of it himself. In the same letter to Mrs. 
Steward, just cited, he says, " I am still drudging on, 
always a poet and never a good one " ; and this from no 
mock-modesty, for he is always handsomely frank in 
telling us whatever of his o\m doing pleased him. This 
was written in the last 3^ear of his life, and at about the 
same time he says elsewhere : " What judgment I had 
increases rather than diminishes, and thoughts, such as 
they are, come crowding in so fast upon me that my 
only difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into 
verse or to give them the other harmony of prose ; I 
have so long studied and practised both, that they are 
grown into a habit and become familiar to me." * I 
think that a man who was primarily a poet would hard- 
ly have felt this equanimity of choice. 

I find a confirmation of this feeling about Dryden in 
his early literary loves. His taste was not an instinct, but 
the slow result of reflection and of the manf illness with 
which he always acknowledged to himself his own mis- 
takes. In this latter respect few men deal so magnani- 
mously with themselves as he, and accordingly few have 
been so happily inconsistent. Ancora imparo might 
have served him for a motto as well as Michael Angelo. 
His prefaces are a complete log of his life, and the habit 
of writing them was a useful one to him, for it forced 
him to think with a pen in his hand, which, according to 
Goethe, " if it do no other good, keeps the mind from 

* Preface to the Fables. 



DRYDEN. 25 

staggering about." In these prefaces we see his taste 
gradually rising from Du Bartas to Spenser, from Cowley 
to Milton, from Corneille to Shakespeare. " I remember 
when I was a boy," he says in his dedication of the 
"Spanish Friar," 1681, " I thought inimitable Spenser a 
mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's Du Bartas, and 
was rapt into an ecstasy when I read these lines : — 

* Now when the winter's keener breath began 
To crystallize the Baltic ocean, 
To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, 
And periwig with snow* fhe baldpate woods.' 

I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian." 
Swift, in his " Tale of a Tub," has a ludicrous passage in 
this style : " Look on this globe of earth, you will find 
it to be a very complete and fashionable dress. What is 
that which some call land, but a fine coat faced with 
green ] or the sea, but a waistcoat of water-tabby % Pro- 
ceed to the particular works of creation, you will find 
how curious joiu-neyman Nature has been to trim up the 
vegetable heaux ; observe how s2M7^kish a periivig adorns 
the head of a heech, and what a fine doublet of white 
satin is worn by the birch." The fault is not in any in- 
aptness of the images, nor in the mere vulgarity of the 
things themselves, but in that of the associations they 
awaken. The "prithee, undo this button" of Lear, 
coming where it does and expressing what it does, is one 
of those touches of the pathetically sublime, of which 
only Shakespeare ever knew the secret. Herrick, too, 
has a charming poem on " Julia's petticoat," the charm 

* Wool is Sylvester's word. Dryden reminds us of Bm-ke in this 
also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom exactly. His 
memory was better for things than for words. This helps to explain 
the length of time it took him to master that vocabulary at last so va- 
rious, full, and seemingly extemporaneous. He is a large quoter, 
though, with his usual inconsistency, he says, " I am no admirer of 
quotations." (Essay on Heroic Plays.) 
2 



26 ' DRYDEN. 

being that he hfts the famihar and the low to the region 
of sentiment. In the passage from Sylvester, it is pre- 
cisely the reverse, and the wig takes as much from the 
sentiment as it adds to a Lord Chancellor. So Pope's 
proverbial verse, 

" True wit is Nature to advantage drest," 

unpleasantly suggests Nature under the hands of a lady's- 
maid.* We have no word in English that will exactly 
define this want of propriety in diction. Vulgar is too 
strong, and common2^lace too weak. Perhaps bourgeois 
comes as near as any. It is to be noticed that Dryden 
does not unequivocally condemn the passage he quotes, 
but qualifies it with an. " if I am not much mistaken." 
Indeed, though his judgment in substantials, like that of 
Johnson, is always worth having, his taste, the negative 
half of genius, never altogether refined itself from a 
colloquial familiarity, which is one of the charms of his 
prose, and gives that air of easy strength in which his 
satire is unmatched. In his " Eoyal Martyr" (1669), 
the tyrant Maximin says to the gods : — 

" Keep you your rain and sunshine in the skies, 
And I'll keep back my flame and sacrifice; 
Your trade of Heaven shall soon be at a stand, 
And all your goods lie dead upon your hand,^'' — 

a passage which has as many faults as only Dryden was 
capable of committing, even to a false idiom forced by 
the last rhyme. The same tyrant in dying exclaims : — 

" And after thee I '11 go, 
Revenging still, and following e'en to th' other world my blow. 
And, shoving back this earth on ichich I sit, 
I HI mount and scatter all the gods J hit.'''' 

* In the Epimeiheus of a poet iisually as elegant as Gray himself, 
one's finer sense is a little jaiTed by the 

" Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses.^* 



DRYDEN. 27 

In the "Conquest of Grenada" (1670), we have : — 

" This little loss in our vast body shews 

So small, that half have never heard the news ; 
Fame 's out of breath e'er she can Jly so far 
To tell 'em all that you have e'er made war.''^ * 

And in the same play, 

" That busy thing, 
TTie soul, is packing up, and just on wing 
Like parting swallows when they seek the spring," 

where the last sweet verse curiously ilkistrates that in- 
equality (poetry on a prose background) which so often 
puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitely worse is the speech of 
Almanzor to his mother's ghost : — 

" I '11 rush into the covert of the night 
And pull thee backward by the shroud to light, 
Or else I "11 squeeze thee like a bladder there, 
And make thee groan thyself away to air." 

What wonder that Dryden should have been substituted 
for Davenant as the butt of the " Rehearsal," and that 
the parody should have had such a run "? And yet it was 
Dryden who, in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happy 
phrase of " boisterous metaphors " ; t it was Dryden who 
said of Cowley, whom he elsewhere calls " the darling 
of my youth," X that he was " sunk in reputation because 
he could never forgive any conceit which came in his 

* This probably suggested to Young the grandiose image In his 
"Last Day" (B. ii.): — 

*' Those overwhelming armies .... 

Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn 
Roused the broad front and called the battle on." 

This, to be sure, is no plagiarism ; but it should be carried to Dryden's 
credit that we catch the poets of the next half-century oftener with 
their hands in his pockets than in those of any one else. 

t Essay on Satire. 

X Ibid. 



28 DRYDEN. 

way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small."* But 
the passages I have thus far cited as specimens of our 
poet's coarseness (for poet he surely was intus, though 
not always in cute) were written before he was forty, and 
he had an odd notion, suitable to his healthy complexion, 
that poets on the whole improve after that date. Man 
at forty, he says, " seems to be fully in his summer 
tropic, . . , . and I believe that it will hold in all great 
poets that, though they wrote before with a certain heat 
of genius which inspired them, yet that heat was not 
perfectly digested." f But artificial heat is never to be 
digested at all, as is plain in Dryden's case. He was a 
man who warmed slowly, and, in his hurry to supply the 
market, forced his mind. The result was the same after 
forty as before. In " (Edipus " (1679) we find, 

" Not one bolt 
Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more, 
' Neio-moukled thunder of a larger size ! " 

This play was written in conjunction with Lee, of whom 

* Preface to Fables. IMen are always inclined to revenge themselves 
on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion to a purer faith. 
Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads him with, and yet his 
popularity was to some extent deserved. He at least had a theory 
that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in 
the faihire of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away from 
the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance of 
Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with 
gas, did certainly mount a little, into the clouds, if not above them, 
though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, 
are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack more 
of Chapelaiii than of the Theban, but his prose is very agreeable, — 
^fontaignc and water, perliaps, but with some flavor of the Gascon 
wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which he 
compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to ]\Ioses striking 
the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his 
dooi-. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's Will-o'-the- 
Wisp had misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice 
but they ai-e always conscious of it, and hate the tempter. 

t Dedication of Georgics. 



DRYDEN. 29 

Drjden relates * that, when some one said to him, " It 

is easy enough to write hke a madman," he rephed, 

" No, it is hard to write hke a madman, but easy enough 

to write hke a fool," — perhaps the most compendious 

lecture on poetry ever delivered. The splendid bit of 

eloquence, which has so much the sheet-iron clang of 

impeachment thunder (I^ope that Dryden is not in the 

Library of Congress !) is perhaps Lee's. The following 

passage almost certainly is his : — 

" Sm*e 't is the end of all things ! Fate has torn 
The lock of Time off, and his head is now 
The ghastly ball of round Eternity! " 

But the next, in which the soul is likened to the pocket 
of an indignant housemaid charged with theft, is wholly 
in Dryden's manner : — 

" No ; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward, 
And shake my soul quite empty in your sight." 

In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian (1690) 
say that he is as much astonished as " drowsy mortals " 
at the last trump, 

" When, called in haste, they fumble for their limbs,'''' 
and propose to take iipon himself the whole of a crime 
shared with another by asking Heaven to charge the hill 
on him. And in " King Arthur," written ten years after 
the Preface from which I have quoted his confession 
about Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind 
he condemned : — 

" Ah for the many souls as but this mom 
Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood, 
But naked now, or shirtedhxit with air." 

Dryden too often violated his own admirable rule, that 
" an author is not to write all he can, but only all he 
ought." t In his worst images, however, there is often a 
vividness that half excuses them. But it is a gTotesque 

* In' a letter to Dennis, 1693. f Preface to Fables. 



30 DRYDEN. 

vividness, as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not 
flash into sudden histre, as in the great poets, where the 
imaginations of poet and reader leap toward each other 
and meet half-way. 

English prose is indebted to Dryden for having freed 
it from the cloister of pedantry. He, more than any 
other single writer, contributed, as NVell by precept as 
example, to give it suppleness of movement and the 
easier air of the modern world. His own style, j uicy 
with proverbial phrases, has that familiar dignity, so hard 
to attain, perhaps unattainable except by one who, like 
Dryden, feels that his position is assured. Charles Cot- 
ton is as easy, but not so elegant ; Walton as familiar, 
but not so flowing ; Swift as idiomatic, but not so ele- 
vated ; Burke more splendid, but not so equally lumi- 
nous. That his style was no easy acquisition (though, 
of course, the aptitude was innate) he himself tells us. 
In his dedication of " Troilus and Cressida " (1679), 
where he seems to hint at the erection of an Academy, 
he says that " the perfect knowledge of a tongue was 
never attained by any single person. The Court, the 
College, and the Town must all be joined in it. And as 
our English is a composition of the dead and living 
tongues, there is required a perfect knowledge, not only 
of the Greek and Latin, but of the Old German, French, 
and Italian, and to help all these, a conversation with 
those authors of our own who have written with the 
fewest faults in prose and verse. But how barbarously 
we yet write and speak your Lordship knows, and I am 
sufficiently sensible in my own English.* For I am 
often put to a stand in considering whether w^hat I write 
be the idiom of the tongue, or false grammar and non- 

* More than half a century later, Orrery, in his " Remarks " on 
Swift, says: " We speak and we write at random ; and if a man's com- 
mon conversation were committed to paper, he would be startled for 



J 



DRYDEN. 31 

sense couched beneath that specious name of Anglicism, 
and have no other way to clear my doubts but by 
transhiting my EngUsh mto Latin, and thereby trying 
what sense the words will bear in a more stable lan- 
guage." Tantce molis erat. Five years later : " The 
proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to 
few ; it is impossible even for a good wit to understand 
and practise them without the help of a liberal educa- 
tion, long reading and digesting of those few good 
authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men and 
manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation ivith 
the best company of both sexes, and, in short, without wear- 
ing off the rust which he contracted while he was laying 
in a stock of learning." In the passage I have italicized, 
it will be seen that Dryden lays some stress upon the 
influence of women in refining language. Swift, also, in 
his plan for an Academy, says : " Now, though I would 
by no means give the ladies the trouble of advising us in 
the reformation of our language, yet T cannot help think- 
ing that, since they have been left out of all meetings 
except parties at play, or where worse designs are car- 
ried on, our conversation has very much degenerated." * 
Swift affirms that the language had grown corrupt since 
the Restoration, and that " the Court, which used to be 
the standard of propriety and correctness of speech, was 
then, and, I think, has ever since continued, the worst 
school in England." f He lays the blame partly on the 

to find himself guilty in so few sentences of so many solecisms and 
such false English." I do not remember for to anywhere in Dryden's 
prose. So few has long been denizened ; no wonder, since it is nothing 
more than si peu Anglicized. 

* Letter to the Lord High Treasurer. 

t Ibid. He complains of " manglings and abbreviations." " What 
does your Lordship think of the words drudg'd, disturb' d, rebuk'd, 
fledg'd, and a thousand others? " Li a contribution to the " Tatler" 
(Xo. 230) he ridicules the use of ''um for ihem, and a number of slang 



32 DRYDEN. 

general licentiousness, partly upon the French education 
of many of Charles's courtiers, and partly on the poets. 
Dryden undoubtedly formed his diction by the usage of 
the Court. The age was a very free-and-easy, not to say 
a very coarse one. Its coarseness was not external, like 
that of Elizabeth's day, but the outward mark of an in- 
ward depravity. What Swift's notion of the refinement 
of women was may be judged by his anecdotes of Stella. 
I w411 not say that Dryden's prose did not gain by the 
conversational elasticity which his frequenting men and 
women of the world enabled him to give it. It is the 
best specimen of every-day style that we have. But the 
habitual dwelling of his mind in a commonplace atmos- 
phere, and among those easy levels of sentiment which 
befitted Will's Coffee-house and the Bird-cage Walk, was 
a damage to his poetry. Solitude is as needful to 
the imagination as society is wholesome for the character. 
He cannot always distinguish between enthusiasm and 
extravagance when he sees them. But apart from 
these influences which I have adduced in exculpation, 
there was certainly a vein of coarseness in him, a want 

phrases, among which is raob. " The war," he says, " has introduced 
abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many more 
campaigns." Speculations, operations, preliminaries, aiiibassadors, pal- 
lisadoes, communication, circumvallation, battalions, are the instances he 
gives, and all ai'e now familiar. No man, or body of men, can dam the 
stream of language. Dryden is rather fond of 'ew for them, but uses it 
rarely in his prose. Swift himself prefers 7 zsto it is, as does Emerson 
still. In Avhat Swift says of the poets, he may be fairly suspected of 
glancing at Dryden, who was his kinsman, and whose prefaces and 
translation of Virgil he ridicules in the " Tale of a Tub." Dryden is 
reported to have said of him, " Cousin Swift is no poet." The Dean 
began his literary career by Pindaric odes to Athenian Societies and 
the like, — perhaps the greatest mistake as to his own powers of which 
an author was ever guilty. It was very likely that he would send these 
to his relative, already distinguished, for his opinion upon them. If 
this was so, the justice of Dryden's judgment must have added to the 
smart. Swift never forgot or forgave: Dryden was careless enough 
to do the one, and large enough to do the other. 



DRYDEN. 33 

of that exquisite sensitiveness which is the conscience 
of the artist. An old gentleman, writing to the Gentle- 
man's Magazine in 1745, professes to remember "plain 
John Dryden (before he paid his court with success to 
the great) in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. 
I have eat tarts at the Mulberry Garden with him 
and Madam Reeve, when our author advanced to a 
sword and Chadreux w^ig." * I always fancy Dryden 
in the drugget, with wig, lace ruffles, and sword super- 
imposed. It is the type of this curiously incongruous 
man. 

The first poem by which Dryden won a general ac- 
knowledgment of his power was the " Annus Mirabilis," 
written in his thirty-seventh year. Pepys, himself not 
altogether a bad judge, doubtless expresses the common 
opinion when he says : " I am very w^ell pleased this 
night with reading a poem I brought home with me 
last night from Westminster Hall, of Dryden's, upon the 
present war ; a very good poem." f And a very good 
poem, in some sort, it continues to be, in spite of its 

* Both Malone and Scott accept this gentleman's evidence without 
question, but I confess suspicion of a memory that runs back more 
than eighty-one years, and recollects a man before he had any claim to 
remembrance. Drj'den was never poor, and there is at Oxford a por- 
trait of him painted in 1664, which represents him in a superb periwig 
and laced band. This was " before he had paid his court with success 
to the great." But the story is at least ben trovato, and morally true 
enough to serve as an illustration. Who the " old gentleman " was has 
never been discovered. Of Crowne ( who has some interest for us as a 
sometime student at Harvard) he says: "Many a cup of metheghn 
have I drank with little starch'd Johnny Crown; we called him so, 
from the stiff, unalterable primness of his long cravat." Crowne re- 
flects no more credit on his Alma Jlater than Downing. Both were 
sneaks, and of such a kind as, I think, can only be produced by a de- 
bauched Puritanism. Crowne, as a rival of Dryden, is contemptuously 
alluded to by Cibber in his " Apology." 

t Diary, III. 390. Almost the only notices of Dryden that make 
him alive to me I have found in the delicious book of this Polonius- 
!Montaign8, the only man who ever had the courage to keep a sincere 
journal, even under the shelter of cipher. -\ 

2* C 



34 DRYDEN. 

amazing blemishes. We must always bear in mind that 
Dryden lived in an age that supplied him with no 
ready-made inspiration, and that big phrases and images 
are apt to be pressed into the service when great ones do 
not volunteer. With this poem begins the long series 
of Dryden's prefaces, of which Swift made such excellent, 
though malicious, fun that I cannot forbear to quote it. 
" I do utterly disapprove and declare against that perni- 
cious custom of making the preface a bill of fare to the 
book. For I have always looked upon it as a high point 
of indiscretion in monster-mongers and other retailers of 
strange sights to hang out a fair picture over the door, 
drawn after the life, with a most eloquent description 

underneath ; this has saved me many a threepence 

Such is exactly the fate at this time of prefaces 

This expedient was admirable at first ; our great Dryden 
has long carried it as far as it would go, and with in- 
credible success. He has often said to me in confidence, 
* that the world would never have suspected him to be so 
great a poet, if he had not assured them so frequently, 
in his prefaces, that it was impossible they could either 
doubt or forget it.' Perhaps it may be so ; however, I 
much fear his instructions have edified out of their place, 
and taught men to grow wiser in certain points where he 
never intended they should." * The monster-mongers is 
a terrible thrust, when we remember some of the come- 
dies and heroic plays which Dryden ushered in this 
fashion. In the dedication of the " Annus " to the city 
of London is one of those pithy sentences of which Dry- 
den is ever afterwards so full, and which he lets fall with 
a carelessness that seems always to deepen the meaning : 
*' I have heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons who 

* Talc of a Tub, Sect. V. Pepys also speaks of buying the " ]\raid- 
en Queen " of ^Ir. Dryden's, wbicli he himself, in his preface, seems 
to brag of, and indeed is a good play. — 18th January, 1668. 



DRYDEN. 35 

have ended unfortunately, but never of any virtuous na- j 
tion ; Providence is engaged too deeply when the cause 
becomes so general." In his " account " of the poem in 
a letter to Sir Robert Howard he says : " I have chosen 
to write my poem in quatrains or stanzas of four in al- 
ternate rhyme, because I have ever judged them more 
noble and of greater dignity, both for the sound and 

number, than any other verse in use amongst us 

The learned languages have certainly a great advantage 
of us in not being tied to the slavery of any rhyme. 
.... But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have 
always found the couplet verse most easy, though not so 
proper for this occasion ; for there the work is sooner at 
an end, every two lines concluding the labor of the poet J' 
A little further on : " They [the French] write in alex- 
andrines, or verses of six feet, such as amongst us is the 
old translation of Homer by Chapman : all which, by 
lengthening their chain,* makes the sphere of their activ- 
ity the greater." I have quoted these passages because, 
in a small compass, they include several things charac- 
teristic of Drj^len. " I have ever judged," and " I have 
always found," are particularly so. If he took up an 
opinion in the morning, he would have found so many 
arguments for it before night that it would seem already 
old and familiar. So with his reproach of rhyme ; a 

* He is fond of this image. In the " Maiden Queen " Celadon tells 
Sabina that, when he is with her rival Florimel, his heart is still her 
prisoner, " it only draws a longer chain after it." Goldsmith's fancy- 
was taken by it; and everybody admires in the " Traveller" the ex- 
traordinary conceit of a heart dragging a lengthening chain. The 
smoothness of too many rhymed pentameters is that of thin ice over 
shallow water; so long as we glide along rapidly, all is well; but if Ave 
dwell a moment on any one spot, we may find ourselves knee-deep in 
mud. A later poet, in trying to improve on Goldsmith, shows the ludi- 
crousness of the image : — 

" And round my heart's leg ties its galling chain." 

To write imaginatively a man should have — imagination ! 



36 DRYDEN. 

year or two before he was eagerly defending it ; * again 
a few years, and he will utterly condemn and drop it in 
his plays, while retaining it in his translations ; after- 
wards his study of Milton leads him to think that blank 
Terse would suit the epic style better, and he proposes 
to try it with Homer, but at last translates one book as 
a specimen, and behold, it is in rhyme ! But the charm 
of this great advocate is, that, whatever side he was on, 
he could always find excellent reasons for it, and state 
them with great force, and abundance of happy illustra- 
tion. He is an exception to the proverb, and is none the 
worse pleader that he is always pleading his own cause. 
The blunder about Chapman is of a kind into which his 
hasty temperament often betrayed him. He remem- 
bered that Chapman's " Iliad " was in a long measure, 
concluded without looking that it was alexandrine, and 
then attributes it generally to his "Homer." Chap- 
man's " Iliad " is done in fourteen-sy liable verse, and his 
*' Odyssee " in the very metre that Dryden himself used 
in his own version, f I remark also what he says of the 
couplet, that it was easy because the second verse con- 
cludes the labor of the poet. And yet it was Dryden 
who found it hard for that very reason. His vehement 
abundance refused those narrow banks, first running 

* See his epistle dedicatory to the " Rival Ladies " (1664). For the 
other side, see particularly a passage in his " Discourse on Epic 
Poetry" (1697). 

t In the same way he had two years before assumed that Shake- 
speare " was the first who, to shun the pn'm?, of continued rhyming, in- 
vented that kind of writing which we call blank verse ! " Drj'den was 
never, I suspect, a very careful student of English literature. He 
seems never to have known that Surrey translated a part of the 
" iEneid " (and with great spirit) into blank verse. Indeed, he was not 
a scholar, in the proper sense of the word, but he had that faculty of rapid 
assimilation without study, so remarkable in Coleridge and other rich 
minds, whose office is rather to impregnate than to inA-ent. These 
brokers of thought perform a great office in literature, second only to 
that of originators. 



DRYDEN. 37 

over into a triplet, and, even then uncontainable, rising 
to an alexandrine in the concluding verse. And I have 
little doubt that it was the roominess, rather than the 
dignity, of the quatrain which led him to choose it. As 
apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere says of 
octosyllabic verse : ^' The thought can turn itself with 
greater ease in a larger compass. When the rhyme 
comes too thick upon us, it straightens the expression : 
we are thinking of the close, when we should be em- 
ployed in adorning the thought. It makes a poet giddy 
with turning in a space too narrow for his imagination." * 
Dryden himself, as was not always the case with him, 
was well satisfied with his work. He calls it his best hith- 
erto, and attributes his success to the excellence of his sub- 
ject, " incomparably the best he had ever had, excepting 
only the Royal Family.''^ The first part is devoted to 
the Dutch war ; the last to the fire of London. The mar- 
tial half is infinitely the better of the two. He altogether 
surpasses his model, Davenant. If his poem lack the 
gravity of thought attained by a few stanzas of " Gondi- 
bert," it is vastly superior in life, in picturesqueness, in 
the energy of single lines, and, above all, in imagination. 
Few men have read " Gondibert," and almost every one 
speaks of it, as commonly of the dead, with a certain 
subdued respect. And it deserves respect as an honest 
effort to bring poetry back to its highest office in the 
ideal treatment of life. Davenant emulated Spenser, 
and if his poem had been as good as his preface, it could 
still be read in another spirit than that of investigation. 
As it is, it always reminds me of Goldsmith's famous 
verse. It is remote, unfriendly, solitary, and, above 

* Essay on Satire. What lie lias said just before this about Butler 
is worth noting. Butler had had a chief hand in the " Rehearsal," but 
Dryden had no grudges where the question was of giving its just 
praise to merit. 



38 DRYDEN. 

all, slow. Its shining passages, for there are such, re- 
mind one of distress-rockets sent up at intervals from 
a ship just about to founder, and sadden rather than 
cheer.* 

The first part of the ''Annus Mhabihs" is by no 
means clear of the false taste of the time,t though it 
has some of Dryden's manliest verses and happiest com- 
parisons, always his two distinguishing merits. Here, 
as almost everywhere else in Dryden, measuring him 
merely as poet, we recall what he, with pathetic pride, 
says of himself in the prologue to " Aurengzebe " : — 

" Let him retire, betwixt two ages cast, 
The first of this, the hindmost of the last." 

What can be worse than what he says of comets ? — 

" Whether they unctuous exlialations are 
Fired by the sun, or seeming so alone, 
Or each some more remote and slippery star 
"Which loses footing when to mortals shown." 

Or than this, of the destruction of the Dutch India- 
ships ] — 

" Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, 

And now their odors armed against them fly ; 

Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, 

And some by aromatic splinters die." 

Dear Dr. Johnson had his doubts about Shakespeare, but 

* The conclusion of the second canto of Book Third is the best con- 
tinuously fine passage. Diyden's poem has nowhere so much mean- 
ing in so small space as Davenant, when he says of the sense of honor 
that, ''J - 

*' Like Power, it grows to nothing, growing less." 

Davenant took the hint of the stanza from Sir Jolm Davies. "Wyatt 
first used it, so far as I know, in English. 

t Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices of style 
and thought (if thought this frothy ferment of the mind may be called) 
tlian in Cotton ^Mather's '• Magnalia." For Mather, like a true pro- 
vincial, appropriates only the mannerism, and, as is usual in such 
cases, betrays all its weakness b}- t]je unconscious parody of exaggera- 
tion. >«^ 



DRYDEN. 39 

here at least was poetry ! This is one of the quatrains 
which he pronounces " worthy of our author."* 

But Dryden himself has said that " a man who is re- 
solved to praise an author with any appearance of jus- 
tice must be sure to take him on the strongest side, and 
where he is least liable to exceptions." This is true 
also of one who wishes to measure an author fairly, for 
the higher wisdom of criticism lies in the capacity to 

admire, 

Leser, wie gefall ich dir ? 
Leser, wie gef iillst du mir ? 

are both fair questions, the answer to the first being 
more often involved in that to the second than is some- 
times thought. The poet in Dryden was never more 
fully revealed than in such verses as these : — 

" And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove,t 
Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand " ; 

" Silent in smoke of cannon they come on " ; 

" And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men " ; 

* The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of the 
goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the thumb and 
forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colors, the beauty of the 
figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. The critical parts of his 
Life of Dryden seem to me the best of his writing in this kind. There 
is little to be gleaned after him. He had studied his author, which he 
seldom did, and his criticism is sympathetic, a thing still rarer with 
him. As illustrative of his own habits, his remarks on Dryden's read- 
ing are curious. 

t Perhaps the hint was given by a phrase of Comeille, monarque en 
peinture. Dryden seldom borrows, unless from Shakespeare, without 
improving, and he borrowed a great deal. Thus iu " Don Sebastian " 
(of suicide): — 

" Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, 
And give them furloughs for the other world ; 
But we, like sentries, are obliged to' stand 
In starless nights and wait the appointed hour." 

The thought is Cicero's, but how it is intensified by the " starless 
nights" ! Dryden, I suspect, got it from his favorite, Montaigne, who 
Bays, " Que nous ne poixvons abandouner cette garnison du monde, sans 



40 DRYDEN. 

" The vigorous seaman every port-hole ph'es, 
And adds his heart to every gun he fires " ; 

"And, though to me unknown, they sure fought well, 
Whom Rupert led, and who were British born." 

This is masculine writing, and yet it must be said that 
there is scarcely a quatrain in which the rhyme does not 
trip him into a 2:)latitude, and there are too many swag- 
gering with that expression forte cVun sentiment faible 
which Voltaire condemns in Corneille, — a temptation 
to which Dryden always lay too invitingly open. But 
there are passages higher in kind than any I have cited, 
because they show imagination. Such are the verses in 
which he describes the dreams of the disheartened 
enemy : — 

" In dreams they fearful precipices tread, 
Or, shipwrecked, labor to some distant shore, 
Or in dark churches walk among the dead " ; 

and those in which he recalls glorious memories, and 
sees where 

" The mighty ghosts of our gi-eat Harries rose, 
And armed Edwards looked with anxious eyes." 

A few verses, like the pleasantly alliterative one in 
which he makes the spider, " from the silent ambush of 
his den," " feel far off the trembling of his thread," show 
that he was beginning to study the niceties of verse, in- 
stead of trusting wholly to what he would have called 
his natural fougue. On the whole, this part of the poem 
is very good war poetry, as war poetry goes (for there is 
but one first-rate poem of the kind in English, — short, 
national, eager as if the writer were personally engaged, 
with the rapid metre of a drum beating the charge, — 

le commandement exprez de celuy qui nous y a mis." (L. ii. chap. 3.) 
In the same play, by a very Drydenish verse, lie gives new force to an 
old comparison : — 

" And I should break through laws divine and human, 
And think 'em cobwebs spread for little man, 
Which all the bulky herd of Nature breaks.^^ 



DKYDEN. 41 

and that is Drayton's " Battle of Agincourt " *), but it 
shows more study of Lucan than of Virgil, and for a 
long time yet we shall find Dryden bewildered by bad 
models. He is always imitating — no, that is not the 
word, always emulating — somebody in his more strictly 
poetical attempts, for in that direction he always needed 
some external impulse to set his mind in motion. This 
is more or less true of all authors ; nor does it detract 
from their originality, which depends wholly on their 
being able so far to forget themselves as to let something 
of themselves slip into what they write. f Of absolute 
originality we will not speak till authors are raised by 
some Deucalion-and-Pyrrha process ; and even then our 
faith would be small, for writers who have no past are 
pretty sure of having no future. Dryden, at any rate, 
always had to have his copy set him at the top of the 
page, and wrote ill or w^ell accordingly. His mind 
(somewhat solid for a poet) warmed slowly, but, once 
fairly heated through, he had more of that good-luck of 
self-oblivion than most men. He certainly gave even a 
liberal interpretation to Moliere's rule of taking his own 
property wherever he found it, though he sometimes 
blundered awkwardly about what was properly his ; but 
in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always 
becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it 
his own. I 

* Not his solemn historical droning under that title, but addressed 
" To the Cambrio-Britons on their harp." 

t " Les poetes euxmemes s'animent et s'^chauffent par la lecture 
des autres poetes. Messieurs de Malherbe, Corneille, &c., se dispo- 
soient au travail par la lecture des poetes qui etoieut de leur gout." — 
Vigneul, Marvilliana, I. 64, 65. 

\ For example, Waller had said, 

" Others may use the ocean as their road, 
Only the English makt it their abode; 

We tread on billows with a steady foot,'' ^ — 



42 DRYDEN. 

Mr. Savage Landor once told me that he said to 
Wordsworth : ^' Mr. Wordsworth, a man may mix poetiy 
with prose as much as he pleases, and it will only elevate 
and enliven; but the moment he mixes a particle of 
prose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole." Words- 
worth, he added, never forgave him. The always hasty 
Dryden, as I think I have already said, was liable, like 
a careless apothecary's 'prentice, to make the same con- 
fusion of ingi'edients, especially in the more mischievous 
way. I cannot leave the " Annus Mirabilis " without 
giving an example of this. Describing the Dutch prizes, 
rather like an auctioneer than a poet, he says that 

" Some English wool, vexed in a Belgian loom, 
And into cloth of spongy softness made, 
Did into France or colder Denmark doom, 
To ruin with Avorse ware our staple trade." 

One might fancy this written by the secretary of a board 
of trade in an unguarded moment ; but we should re- 
member that the poem is dedicated to the city of Lon- 
don. The depreciation of the rival fabrics is exquisite ; 
and Dryden, the most English of our poets, would not 
be so thoroughly English if he had not in him some 
fibre of la nation houtiquiere. Let us now see how he 
succeeds in attempting to infuse science (the most obsti- 

long before Campbell. Campbell helps himself to both thoughts, en- 
livens them into 

" Her march is o'er the mountain wave, 
Her home is on the deep," 
and they are his forevermore. His "leviathazis afloat" he lifted from. 
the " Annus Mirabilis " ; but in what court could Dryden sue? Again, 
Waller in another poem calls the Duke of York's flag 

" His dreadful streamer, like a comet's hair"; 

and this, I believe, is the first application of the celestial portent to 
this particular comparison. Yet Milton's "imperial ensign" waves 
defiant behind his impregnable lines, and even Campbell flaunts his 
" meteor flag " in Waller's face. Gray's bard might be sent to the 
lock-up, but even he would find bail. 

" C'est Imiter quelqu'un que de planter des chous." 



DRYDEN. 43 

nately prosy material) with poetry. Speaking of " a 
more exact knowledge of the longitudes," as he explains 
in a note, he tells us that, 

" Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go, 
And view the ocean leaning on the sky ; 
From thence our rolling neighbors we shall know, 
And on the lunar world securely pry." 

Dr. Johnson confesses that he does not understand 
this. Why should he, when it is plain that Dryden was 
wholly in the dark himself] To understand it is none 
of my business, but I confess that it interests me as an 
Americanism. We have hitherto been credited as the 
inventors of the "jumping-off place" at the extreme 
western verge of the world. But Dryden was before- 
hand with us. Though he doubtless knew that the 
earth was a sphere (and perhaps that it was flattened at 
the poles), it was always a flat surface in his fancy. In 
his " Amphitryon," he makes Alcmena say : — 

" No, I would fly thee to the ridge of earth, 
And leap the precipice to 'scape thy sight." 

•And in his " Spanish Friar," Lorenzo says to Elvira that 
they " will travel together to the ridge of the w^orld, and 
then drop together into the next." It is idle for us poor 
Yankees to hope that we can invent anything. To say 
sooth, if Dryden had left nothing behind him but the 
" Annus Mirabilis," he might have served as a type of 
the kind of poet America would have produced by the big- 
gest-river-and-tallest-mountain recipe, — longitude and 
latitude in plenty, with marks of culture scattered here 
and there like the carets on a proof-sheet. 

It is now time to say something of Dryden as a 
dramatist. In the thirty-two years between 1662 and 
1694 he produced twenty-five plays, and assisted Lee in 
two. I have hinted that it took Dryden longer than 
most men to find the true bent of his genius. On a 



44 DEYDEN. 

superficial view, he might ahiiost seem to confirm that 
theory, maintained by Johnson, among others, that 
genius was nothing more than great intellectual power 
exercised persistently in some particular direction which 
chance decided, so that it lay in circumstance merely 
whether a man should turnout a Shakespeare or a Newton. 
But when we come to compare what he wrote, regardless 
of Minerva's averted face, with the spontaneous produc- 
tion of his happier muse, we shall be inclined to think 
his example one of the strongest cases against the theory 
in question. He began his dramatic career, as usual, by 
rowing against the strong current of his nature, and 
pulled only the more doggedly the more he felt himself 
swept down the stream. His first attempt was at com- 
edy, and, though his earliest = piece of that kind (the 
*'Wild Gallant," 1663) utterly fiiiled, he wrote eight 
others afterwards. On the 23d February, 1663, Pepys 
writes in his diary : "To Court, and there saw the 

* Wild Gallant ' performed by the king's house ; but it 
was ill acted, and the play so poor a thing as I never 
saw in my life almost, and so little answering the name, 
that, from the beginning to the end, I could not, nor 
can at this time, tell certainly wdiich was the Wild 
Gallant. The king did not seem pleased at all the 
whole play, nor anybody else." After some alteration, 
it was revived with more success. On its publication in 
1669 Dryden honestly admitted its former failure, 
though with a kind of salvo for his self-love. " I made 
the town my judges, and the greater part condemned it. 
After which I do not think it my concernment to defend 
it with the ordinary zeal of a poet for his decried poem, 
though Corneille is more resolute in his prefece before 

* Pertharite,' * which was condemned more universally 

* Corneille's tragedy of " Pertharite " was acted unsuccessfully in 
1659. Racine made free use of it in his more fortunate " Andromaque." 



DRYDEN. • 45 

than this Yet it was received at Court, and was 

more than once the divertisement of his Majesty, by his 
own command." Pepys lets us amusingly behind the 
scenes in the matter of his Majesty's divertisement. 
Dryden does not seem to see that in the condemnation 
of something meant to amuse the public there can be no 
question of degree. To fail at all is to fail utterly. 

" Tons les genres sontpermis, hors le genre ennuyeux.^^ 

In the reading, at least, all Dryden's comic writing for 
the stage must be ranked with the latter class. He 
himself would fain make an exception of the " Spanish 
Friar," but I confess that I rather wonder at than enyj 
those who can be amused by it. His comedies lack 
everything that a comedy should have, — lightness, 
quickness of transition, unexpectedness of incident, easy 
cleverness of dialogue, and humorous contrast of charac- 
ter brought out by identity of situation. The comic 
parts of the " Maiden Queen " seem to me Dryden's best, 
but the merit even of these is Shakespeare's, and there 
is little choice where even the best is only tolerable. 
The common quality, however, of all Dryden's comedies 
is their nastiness, the more remarkable because we have 
ample evidence that he was a man of modest conversa- 
tion. Pepys, who was by no means squeamish (for he 
found "Sir Martin Marall " "the most entire piece of 
mirth .... that certainly ever was writ .... very 
good wit therein, not fooling "), writes in his diary of the 
19th June, 1668 : " My wife and Deb to the king's play- 
house to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw the new 
play 'Evening Love,' of Dryden's, which, though the 
world commends, she likes not." The next day he saw 
it himself, " and do not like it, it being very smutt}'-, 
and nothing so good as the ' Maiden Queen ' or the ' In- 
dian Emperor ' of Dryden's making. / ivas tj^onbled at 



46 DRYDEN. 

iV On the 22cl he adds : " Calling this day at Her- 
ringman's,* he tells me Dryden do himself call it but a 
fifth-rate play." This was no doubt true, and yet, 
though Dryden in his preface to the play says, " I con- 
fess I have given [yielded] too much to the people in it, 
and am ashamed for them as well as for myself, that I 
have pleased them at so cheap a rate," he takes care to 
add, "not that there is anything here that I would not J 
defend to an ill-natured judge." The plot was from Cal- 
deron, and the author, rebutting tlije charge of plagiarism, 
tells us that the king ("without whose command they 
should no longer be troubled with anything of mine ") had 
already answered for him by saying, " that he only de- 
sired that they who accused me of theft would always 
steal him plays like mine." Of the morals of the play he 
has not a word, nor do I believe that he was conscious of 
any harm in them till he was attacked by Collier, and then 
(with some protest against what he considers the undue 
severity of his censor) he had the manliness to confess 
that he had done wrong. " It becomes me not to draw 
my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so 
often drawn it for a good one." f And in a letter to his 
correspondent, Mrs. Thomas, written only a few weeks 
before his death, warning her against the example of 
Mrs. Behn, he says, with remorseful sincerity: " I confess 
I am the last man in the world who ought in justice to 
arraign her, who have been myself too much a libertine 
in most of my poems, which I should be well contented I 
had time either to purge or to see them fairly burned." 
Congreve was less patient, and even Dryden, in the last 
epilogue he ever wrote, attempts an excuse : — 

" Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too for, 
When with our Theatres he waged a war; 
He tells you that this very moral age 
Received the first infection from the Stage, 

* Drj^den's publisher. f Preface to the Fables. 



DEYDEN. 47 

But sure a banished Court, -with lewdness fraught, 
The seeds of open vice returning brought. 

■> 
"Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed, 
Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine, 
The strumpet was adored with rites divine. 

The poets, who must live by courts or starve, " 
AVere proud so good a Government to serve, 
And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane. 
Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain." 

Dryden least of all men should have stooped to this 
palliation, for he had, not without justice, said of him- 
self : " The same parts and application which have made 
me a poet might have raised me to any honors of the 
gown." Milton and ^Earvell neither lived by the Court, 
nor starved. Charles Lamb most ingeniously defends the 
Comedy of the Restoration as " the sanctuary and quiet 
Alsatia of hunted casuistry," where there was no pre- 
tence of representing a real world.* But this was cer- 
tainly not so. Drj'den again and again boasts of the su- 
perior advantage which his age had over that of the elder 
dramatists, in painting polite life, and attributes it to a 
greater freedom of intercourse between the poets and the 
fi'equenters of the Court, f We shall be less surprised 
at the hind of refinement upon which Dryden congratu- 
lated himself, when we learn (from the dedication of 
" Marriage a la Mode ") that the Earl of Rochester was 
its exemplar : " The best comic writers of our age will 
join with me to acknowledge that they have copied the 
gallantries of courts, the delicacy of expression, and the 
decencies of behavior from your Lordship." In judging 

* I interpret some otherwise ambiguous passages in this charming 
and acute essay by its title: "On the artificial comedy of the last 
century." 

t See especially his defence of the epilogue to the Second Part of 
t^e " Conquest of Granada " (1672). 



48 DRYDEN. 

Dry den, it should be borne in mind that for some years 
he was under contract to deliver three plays a year, a 
kind of bond to which no man should subject his brain 
who has a decent respect for the quality of its products. 
We should remember, too, that in his day manners meant 
what we call morals, that custom always makes a larger 
part of virtue among average men than they are quite 
aware, and that the reaction from an outward conform- 
ity which had no root in inward faith may for a time have 
given to the frank expression of laxity an air of honesty 
that made it seem almost refreshing. There is no such 
hotbed for excess of license as excess of restraint, and 
the arrogant fanaticism of a single virtue is apt to make 
men suspicious of tyranny in all the rest. But the riot 
of emancipation could not last long, for the more toler- 
ant society is of private vice, the more exacting will it 
be of public decorum, that excellent thing, so often the 
plausible substitute for things more excellent. By 1678 
the pubUc mind had so far recovered its tone that Dry- 
den's comedy of " Limberham " was barely tolerated for 
three niohts. I will let the man who looked at human 
nature from more sides, and therefore judged it more 
gently than any other, give the only excuse possible for 

Dryden : — 

" Men's judgments are 
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward 
Do draw the inward quality after them 
To suffer all alike." 

Dryden's own apology only makes matters worse for 
him by showing that he committed his offences with his 
eyes wide open, and that he wrote comedies so wholly 
in despite of nature as never to deviate into the comic. 
Failing as clown, he did not scruple to take on himself 
the office of Chiffinch to the palled appetite of the j)ub- 
lic. " For I confess my chief endeavours are to delight 



DRYDEN. 49 

the age in which I hve. If the humour of this be for 
low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force 
my genius to obey it, though with more reputation I 
could write in verse. I know I am not so fitted by na- 
ture to write comedy ; I want that gayety of humour 
which is requisite to it. My conversation is slow and 
dull, my humom' saturnine and reserved : In short, I am 
none of those who endeavour to break jests in company 
or make repartees. So that those who decry my come- 
dies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit : 
lieftutation in them is the last thing to which I shall j)re- 
tend."* For my own part, though I have been forced 
to hold my nose in picking my way through these or- 
dures of Dryden, I am free to say that I think them far 
less morally mischievous than that corps-de-hall et lit- 
erature in which the most animal of the passions is made 
more temptingly naked by a veil of French gauze. Nor 
does Dryden's lewdness leave such a reek in the mind 
as the filthy cynicism of Swift, who delighted to imcover 
the nakedness of our common mother. 

It is pleasant to follow Dryden into the more conge- 
nial region of heroic plays, though here also we find him 
making a false start. Anxious to please the king,t and 
so able a reasoner as to convince even himself of the 
justice of whatever cause he argued, he not only wrote 
tragedies in the French style, but defended his practice 
in an essay which is by far the most delightful repro- 
duction of the classic dialogue ever written in English. 
Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sid- 
ley), Crites (Sir R. Howard), and Neander (Dryden) are 
the four partakers in the debate. The comparative 

* Defence of an Essay on Dramatick Poesy. 

t " The favor which heroick plays have lately found upon our 
theatres has been wholly derived to them from the countenance and 
approbation they have received at Court." (Dedication of "Indian 
Emperor" to Duchess of Monmouth.) 

3 D 



50 DRYDEN. 

merits of ancients and moderns, of the Shakespearian and 
contemporary drama, of rhyme and blank verse, the value 
of the three (supposed) Aristotelian unities, are the main 
topics discussed. The tone of the discussion is admira- 
ble, midway between bookishness and talk, and the fair- 
ness with which each side of the argument is treated 
shows the breadth of Dryden's mind perhaps better than 
any other one piece of his writing. There are no men of 
straw set up to be knocked down again, as there com- 
monly are in debates conducted upon this plan. The 
" Defence " of the Essay is to be taken as a supplement 
to Neander's share in it, as well as many scattered pas- 
sages in subsequent prefaces and dedications. All the in- 
terlocutors agree that "the sweetness of English verse was 
never understood or practised by our fathers," and that 
" our poesy is much improved by the happiness of some 
writers yet living, who first taught us to mould our 
thoughts into easy and significant words, to retrench the 1 
superfluities of expression, and to make our rhyme so 
properly a part of the verse that it should never mis- 
lead the sense, but itself be led and governed by it," In 
another place he shows that by "living writers" he meant 
Waller and Denham. " Rhyme has all the advantages of 
prose besides its own. But the excellence and dignity 
of it were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it : 
he first made writing easily an art ; first showed us to 
conclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which in 
the verse before him runs on for so many lines together 
that the reader is out of breath to overtake it." * Dry- 
den afterwards changed his mind, and one of the excel- 
lences of his own rhymed verse is, that his sense is too 
ample to be concluded by the distich. Rhyme had been 
censured as unnatural in dialogue ; but Dry den replies 
that it is no more so than blank verse, since no man 

* Dedication of " Rival Ladies." 



DRYDEN. 51 

talks any kind of verse in real life. But the argument 
for rhyme is of another kind. " I am satisfied if it 
cause delight, for delight is the chief if not the only end 
of poesy [he should have said meaiis] ; instruction can 
be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only in- 
structs as it delights The converse, therefore, 

which a poet is to imitate must be heightened with all 
the arts and ornaments of poesy, and must be such 
as, strictly considered, could never be supposed spoken 

by any without premeditation Thus prose, though 

the rightful prince, yet is by common consent deposed 
as too weak for the government of serious plays, and, 
he failing, there now start up two competitors; one 
the nearer in blood, which is blank verse ; the other 
more fit for the ends of government, which is rhyme. 
Blank verse is, indeed, the nearer prose, but he is blem- 
ished with the weakness of his predecessor. Rhyme (for 
I will deal clearly) has somewhat of the usurper in him ; 
but he is brave and generous, and his dominion pleas- 
ing." * To the objection that the difficulties of rhyme 
will lead to circumlocution, he answers in substance, that 
a good poet will know how to avoid them. 

It is curious how long the superstition that Waller 

was the refiner of English verse has prevailed since Dry- 

-den first gave it vogue. He was a very poor poet and 

a purely mechanical versifier. He has lived mainly on 

the credit of a single couplet, 

" The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, 
Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made," 

in which the melody alone belongs to him, and the con- 



* Defence of the Essay. Dryden, in the happiness of his illustrative 
comparisons, is almost unmatched. Like himself, they occupy a mid- 
dle ground between poetry and prose, — they are a cross between 
metaphor and simile. 



52 DEYDEN. 

ceit, such as it is, to Samuel Daniel, who said, long be- 
fore, that the body's 

" Walls, gi'own thin, permit the mind 
To look out thorough and his frailty find." 

Waller has made Tvorse nonsense of it in the transfu- 
sion. It might seem that Ben Jonson had a prophetic 
foreboding of him Tvhen he wrote : " Others there are 
that have no composition at all, but a kind of tuning 
and rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and 
slides and only makes a sound. Women's poets they 
are called, as you have women's tailors. 

They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream 
In which there is no torrent," nor scarce stream. 

You may sound these wits and find the depth of them 
with your middle-finger." * It seems to have been ta- 
ken for granted by Waller, as afterwards by Dryden, 
that our elder poets bestowed no thought upon their 
verse. " Waller was smooth," but unhappily he was 
also flat, and his importation of the French theory of 
the couplet as a kind of thought-coop did nothing but 
mischief t He never compassed even a smoothness ap- 
proaching this description of a nightingale's song by a 
third-rate poet of the earlier school, — 

" Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note 
Through the sleek passage of her open throat, 
A clear, un wrinkled song," — 

* Discoveries. 

t What a wretched rhymer he could be we may see in his alteration 
of the "Maid's Tragedy" of Beaumont and Fletcher: — 

" Not long since walking in the field, 
My nurse and I, we there beheld 
A goodly fruit ; which, tempting me, 
I would have plucked ; but, trembling, she, 
Whoever eat those hemes, cried, 
In less than half an hour died ! " 

What intolerable seesaw! Not much of Byron's " fatal facility" 
in these octosyllabics ! 



DRYDEN. 53 

one of whose beauties is its running over into the thu-d 
verse. Those poets indeed 

" Felt music's pulse in all her arteries " ; 
and Dryden himself found out, when he came to try it, 
that blank verse was not so easy a thing as he at first 
conceived it, nay, that it is the most difiicult of all verse, 
and that it must make up in harmony, by variety of 
pause and modulation, for what it loses in the melody 
of rhyme. In what makes the chief merit of his later 
versification, he but rediscovered the secret of his pre- 
decessors in giving to rhymed pentameters something of 
the freedom of blank verse, and not mistaking metre for 
rhythm. 

Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has suffi- 
ciently lamented the awkwardness of movement imposed 
upon the French dramatists by the gyves of rhyme. 
But he considers the necessity of overcoming this ob- 
stacle, on the whole, an advantage. Difficulty is his 
tenth and superior muse. How did Dryden, who says 
nearly the same thing, succeed in his attempt at the 
French manner ? He fell into every one of its vices, 
without attaining much of what constitutes its excel- 
lence. From the nature of the language, all French 
poetry is purely artificial, and its high polish is all that 
keeps out decay. - The length of their dramatic verse 
forces the French into much tautology, into bombast in 
its original meaning, the stuffing out a thought with 
words till it fills the line. The rigid system of their 
rhyme, which makes it much harder to manage than in 
English, has accustomed them to inaccuracies of thought 
which would shock them in prose. For example, in the 
" Cinna " of Corneille, as originally written, Emilie says 
to Augustus, — 

" Ces flammes dans nos cceurs d^s longtemps ^toient nees, 
Et ce sout des secrets de plus de quatre amities." 



54 DRYDEN. 

I say nothing of the second verse, which is purely pro- 
saic surplusage exacted by the rhyme, nor of the jin- 
gling together of ces, des, etoient, nees, deSy and seci^ets, 
but I confess that nees does not seem to be the epithet 
that Corneille would have chosen for Jtammes, if he could 
have had his own way, and that flames would seem of 
all things the hardest to keep secret. But in revising, 
Corneille changed the first verse thus, — 

" Ces flammes dans nos coeurs sans voire ordre Etoient n^es." 

Can anything be more absurd than flames born to order ] 
Yet Voltaire, on his guard against these rhyming pit- 
falls for the sense, does not notice this in his minute 
comments on this play. Of extravagant metaphor, the 
result of this same making sound the file-leader of sense, 
a single example from " Heraclius " shall suffice : — 

" La vapeur de mon sang ira gi'ossir la foudre 
Que Dieu tient dejaprete a le reduire en poudre." 

One cannot think of a Louis Quatorze Apollo except in 
a full-bottomed periwig, and the tragic style of their 
poets is always showing the disastrous influence of that 
portentous comet. It is the style 2^€rruque in another 
than the French meaning of the phrase, and the skill 
lay in dressing it majestically, so that, as Cibber says, 
" upon the head of a man of sense, if it hecame him, it 
could never fail of drawing to him a more partial regard 
and benevolence than could possibly be hoped for in an 
ill-made one." It did not become Dryden, and he left 
it off * 

Like his own Zimri, Dryden was '^ all for " this or 
that fancy, till he took up with another. But even 
while he was writing on French models, his judgment 
could not be blmded to their defects. " Look upon the 

* In more senses than one. His last and best portrait shows him in 
his own gray hair. 



DRYDEN. _55 

* Cinna ' and the ' Pompey,' they are not so properly to 
be called plays as long discourses of reason of State, and 

* Polieucte ' in matters of religion is as solemn as the 
long stops ujDon oiu* organs ; . . . . their actors speak 

by the hour-glass like our parsons I deny not 

but this may suit well enough with the French, for as 
we, who are a more sullen people, come to be diverted 
at our plays, so they, who are of an airy and gay tem- 
per, come thither to make themselves more serious." * 
With what an air of innocent unconsciousness the sar- 
casm is driven home ! Again, while he was still slaving 
at these bricks without straw, he says : " The present 
French poets are generally accused that, wheresoever 
they lay the scene, or in whatever age, the manners of 
their heroes are wholly French. Racine's Bajazet is 
bred at Constantinople, but his civilities are conveyed to 
him by some secret passage from Versailles into the Se- 
raglio." It is curious that Voltaire, speaking of the Bere- 
nice of Racine, praises a passage in it for precisely what 
Dryden condemns : " II semble qu'on entende Henriette 
d'Angleterre elle-meme parlant au marquis de Vardes. 
La politesse de la cour de Louis XIV., I'agrement de la 
langue Frangaise, la douceur de la versification la plus 
naturelle, le sentiment le plus tendre, tout se trouve 
dans ce pen de vers." After Dryden had broken away 
from the heroic style, he speaks out more plainly. In 
the Preface to his "All for Love," in reply to some 
cavils upon ''little, and not essential decencies," the de- 
cision about which he refers to a master of ceremonies, 
he goes on to say : " The French poets, I confess, are 
strict observers of these punctilios ; .... in this nice- 
ty of manners does the excellency of French poetry con- 
sist. Their heroes are the most civil people breathing, 
but their good breeding seldom extends to a word of 

* Essay on Dramatick Poesy. 



56 DRYDEN. 

sense. All their wit is in their ceremony ; they want 
the genius which animates our stage, and therefore 't 
is but necessary, when they cannot please, that they 
should take care not to offend They are so care- 
ful not to exasperate a critic that they never leave him. 
any work, .... for no part of a poem is worth our 
discommending where the whole is insipid, as when we 
have once tasted palled wine we stay not to examine it 
glass by glass. But while they affect to shine in trifles, 

they are often careless in essentials For my part, 

I desire to be tried by the laws of my own country." 
This is said in heat, but it is plain enough that his mind 
was wholly changed. In his discourse on epic poetry he is 
as decided, but more temperate. He says that the French 
heroic verse " runs with more activity than strength.* 
Their language is not strung with sinews like our Eng- 
lish j it has the nimbleness of a greyhound, but not the 
bulk and body of a mastiff. Our men and our verses 
overbear them by their weight, and pondere, non nume- 
rOy is the British motto. The French have set up pur- 
ity for the standard of their language, and a masculine 
vigor is that of ours. Like their tongue is the genius 
of their poets, — light and trifling in comparison of the 
English." t 

Dryden might have profited by an admirable saying 

* A French hendecasyllable verse runs exactly like our ballad 
measure : — 

A cobbler there was and he lived in a stall, .... 
La raison, pour marcher , n'a souvent qu^une voye. 

(Dryden's note.) 
The verse is not a hendecasyllable. " Attended watchfully to her 
recitative (Mile. Duchesnois), and find that, in nine lines out of ten, 
' A cobbler there was,' &c., is the tune of the French heroics." — 
Moore's Diary, 24th April, 1821. 

t " The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except 
among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not 
support it, differs in nothing from prose." — Gray to West. 



DRYDEN. 57 

of his own, that " they who would combat general au- 
thority with particular opinion must first establish them- 
selves a reputation of understanding better than other 
men." He understood the defects much better than 
the beauties of the French theatre. Lessing was even 
more one-sided in his judgment upon it.* Goethe, with 
his usual wisdom, studied it carefully without losing his 
temper, and tried to profit by its structural merits. 
Dryden, with his eyes wide open, copied its worst faults, 
especially its declamatory sentiment. He should have 
known that certain things can never be transplanted, 
and that among these is a style of poetry whose great 
excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy with the 
genius of the people among whom it came into being. 
But the truth is, that Dryden had no aptitude whatever 
for the stage, and in writing for it he was attempting 
to make a trade of his genius, — an arrangement from 
which the genius always withdraws in disgust. It was 
easier to make loose thinking and the bad writing which 
betrays it pass unobserved while the ear was occupied 
with the sonorous music of the rhyme to which they 
marched. Except in " All for Love," " the only play," 
he tells us, " which he wrote to please himself," f there 
is no trace of real passion in any of his tragedies. This, 
indeed, is inevitable, for there are no characters, but only 
personages, in any except that. That is, in many re- 
spects, a noble play, and there are few finer scenes, 

* Diderot and Eousseau, however, tliought their language unfit for 
poetry, and Voltaire seems to have half agi-eed with them. No one 
has expressed this feeling more neatly than Fauriel : " Nul doute que 
Ton ne puisse dire en prose des choses ^minemment poetiques, tout 
comme il n'est que trop cex'tain que Ton pent en dire de fort prosaiques 
en vers, et meme en excellents vers, en vers ^Idgamment tourn^s, et 
en beau langage. C'est un fait dont je n'ai pas besoin d'indiquer 
d'exemples : aucune litterature n'en fournirait autant que le notre." — 
Hist, de la Poesie Proven^ale, II. 237. 

t Parallel of Poetry and Painting. . . 

3* 



58 DRYDEN. 

whether in the conception or the carrying out, than that 

between Antony and Ventidius in the first act.* 

As usual, Dryden's good sense was not Wind to the 

extravagances of his dramatic style. In " Mac Flecknoe " 

he makes his own Maximin the type of childish rant, 

" And little Maximius the gods defy " ; 

but, as usual also, he could give a plausible reason for 

his own mistakes by means of that most fallacious of all 

fallacies which is true so far as it goes. In his Prologue 

to the " Koyal Martyr " he says : — 

" And he who servilely creeps after sense "■ 
Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence. 

But, when a tyrant for his theme he had. 
He loosed the reins and let his muse run mad, 
And, though he stumbles in a full career, 
Yet rashness is a better fault than fear; 

They then, who of each trip advantage take, 

Find out those faults which they want wit to make." 

And in the Preface to the same play he tells us : "1 
have not everywhere observed the equality of numbers 
in my verse, partly by reason of my haste, but more es- 
pecially because I tvould not have my sense a slave to syl- 
lahles^ Dryden, when he had not a bad case to argue, 
would have had small respect for the wit whose skill lay 
in the making of faults, and has himself, where his self- 
love was not engaged, admirably defined the boundary 
which divides boldness from rashness. What Quintilian 
says of Seneca applies very aptly to Dryden : " Velles 
eum suo ingenio dixisse, alieno judicio." f He was think- 
ing of himself, I fancy, when he makes Ventidius say of 
Antony, — 

* " H y a seulementla sc^ne de Ventidius et (S.'Antoine qui est digne 
de Corneille. C'est la le sentiment de milord Bolingbroke et de tons 
les bons auteurs ; c'est ainsi que pensait Addisson." — Voltaire to 
JI. DE Fromont, 15th November, 1735. 

t lust. X., i. 129. 



DRYDEN. -59 

" He starts out -wide 
And bounds into a vice that bears him far 
From his first course, and plunges him in ills ; 
But, when his danger makes him find his fault, 
Quick to obsei*ve, and full of sharp remorse, 
He censures eagerly his own misdeeds, 
Judging himself with malice to himself. 
And not forgiving what as man he did 
Because his other parts are more than man." 

But bad though they nearly all are as wholes, his plays 
contam passages which only the great masters have sur- 
passed, and to the level of which no subsequent writer 
for the stage has ever risen. The necessity of rhyme 
often forced him to a platitude, as where he says, — 

" My love was blind to your deluding art, ; 

But blind men feel when stabbed so near the heart." * 

But even in rhyme he not seldom justifies his claim to 
the title of "glorious John." In the veiy play from 
which I have just quoted are these verses in his best 
manner : — 

** No, like his better Fortune I '11 appear, 
With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair, 
Just flying forward from her rolling sphere." 

His comparisons, as I have said, are almost always hap- 
py. This, from the "Indian Emperor," is tenderly 
pathetic : — 

" As callow birds. 
Whose mother 's killed in seeking of the prey. 
Cry in their nest and think her long away. 
And, at each leaf that stirs, each blast of wind. 
Gape for the food which they must never find." 

And this, of the anger with which the Maiden Queen, 
striving to hide her jealousy, betrays her love, is vigor- 
ous : — 

" Her rage was love, and its tempestuous flame, 
Like lightning, showed the heaven from whence it came. 

* Conquest of Grenada, Second Part. 



60 DRYDEN. 

The following simile from the " Conquest of Grenada " 
is as well expressed as it is apt in conception : ■ — 

" I scarcely understand my own intent; 
But, silk-Avorm like, so long within have wrought, 
That I am lost in my own web of thought." 

In the "Rival Ladies," Angelina, walking in the dark, 
describes her sensations naturally and strikingly : — . 

" No noise but what my footsteps make, and they 
Sound dreadfully and louder than by day : 
They double too, and every step I take 
Sounds thick, methinks, and more than one could make." 

In all the rhymed plays* there are many passages 
which one is rather inclined to like than sure he would 
be right in liking them. The following verses from 
" Aurengzebe " are of this sort : — 

" My love was si;ch it needed no return, 
Rich in itself, like elemental fire, 
Whose pureness does no aliment require." 

This is Cowleyish, and pureness is surely the wrong 
word; and yet it is better than mere commonplace. 
Perhaps what oftenest turns the balance in Dryden's 
favor, when we are weighing his claims as a poet, is his 
persistent capability of enthusiasm. To the last he 
kindles, and sometimes almost flashes out that super- 
natural light which is the supreme test of poetic genius. 
As he himself so finely and characteristically says in 
" Aurengzebe," there was no period in his life when it 
was not true of him that 

" He felt the inspiring heat, the absent god return." 

The verses which follow are full of him, and, with the 
exception of the single word underioent, are in his lucki- 
est manner : — 

" One loose, one sally of a hero's soul, 
Does all the military art control. 

* In most, he mingles blank verse. 



DRYDEN. 61 

While timorous wit goes round, or fords the shore, 
He shoots the gulf, and is already o'er. 
And, when the enthusiastic fit is spent, 
Looks back amazed at what he underwent." * 

Pithy sentences and phrases always drop from Dry- 
den's pen as if imawares, whether in prose or verse. 1 
string together a few at random : — 

" The greatest argument for love is love." 

" Few know the use of life before 't is past." 

" Time gives himself and is not valued." 

" Death in itself is nothing; but we fear 

To be we know not what, we know not where." 

" Love either finds equality or makes it ; 
Like death, he knows no difference in degrees." 

" That 's empire, that which I can give avray." 

" Yours is a soul in-egularly great, 
Which, wanting temper, yet abounds in heat." 

" Forgiveness to the injured does belong, 

But they ne'er pardon Avho have done the "WTong." 

" Poor women's thoughts are all extempore." 

" The cause of love can never be assigned, 
'T is in no face, but in the lover's mind." f 

" Heaven can forgive a crime to penitence, 
For Heaven can judge if penitence be tru« ; 
But man, who knows not hearts, should make examples." 

" Kings' titles commonly begin by force, 
Which time wears off" and mellows into right." 

" Fear's a large promiser; who subject live 
To that base passion, know not what they give." 

" The secret pleasure of the generous act i 
Is the great mind's great bribe." f 

" That bad thing, gold, bixys all good things." 

" Why, love does all that 's noble here below." 

* Conquest of Grenada. 

t This recalls a striking verse of Alfred de Musset: — 
•' La muse est toujours belle, 
Meme pour I'insense, meme pour I'impuissant, 
Car sa beaute pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elk.'''' 



61 DRYDEN. 

" To prove religion true, 
If either wit or sufferings could suffice, 
All faiths afford the constant and the wise." 

But Dryden, as he tells us himself, 

" Grew weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme ; 
Passion 's too fierce to be in fetters bound. 
And Nature flies him like enchanted ground." 

The finest things in his plays were written in blank 
verse, as vernacular to him as the alexandrine to the 
French. In this he vindicates his claim as a poet. His 
diction gets wings, and both his verse and his thought 
become capable of a reach which was denied them when 
set in the stocks of the couplet. The solid man becomes 
even airy in this new-found freedom : Anthony says, 

" How I loved, 
Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours 
That danced away with down upon yourfeeV 

And what image was ever more delicately exquisite, 
w^hat movement more fadingl}- accordant with the sense, 
than in the last two verses of the following passage ] 

" I feel death rising higher still and higher. 
Within my bosom ; every breath I fetch 
Shuts up my life within a shorter compass, 
And^ like the vanishing sound oj" bells, grows less 
And less each pulse, till it be lost in air.'''' * 

Nor was he altogether without pathos, though it is rare 

with him. The following passage seems to me tenderly 

fuU of it : — 

" Something like 
That voice, methinks, I should have somewhere heard ; 
But floods of woe have hurried it far off 
Beyond my ken of soul." f 

And this single verse from " Aurengzebe " : — 

" Live still! oh live! live even to be unkind! " 

with its passionate eagerness and sobbing repetition, is 

* Rival Ladies. f Don Sebastian. 



DRYDEN. 6S^ 

worth a ship-load of the long-di^awn treacle of modern 
self-compassioii. 

Now and then, to be sm^e, we come upon something 
that makes us hesitate again whether, after all, Dryden 
was not grandiose rather than great, as in the two pas- 
sages that next follow : — 

" He looks secure of death, superior greatness, 
Like Jove when he made Fate and said, Thou art 
The slave of my creation." * 

" I 'm pleased with my own work ; Jove was not more 
With infant nature, when his spacious hand 
Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas, 
To give it the first push and see it roll 
Along the vast abyss." f 

I should say that Dryden is more apt to dilate our 
fancy than our thought, as great poets have the gift of 
doing. But if he have not the potent alchemy that 
transmutes the lead of our commonplace associations into 
gold, as Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his 
sense is always up to the sterling standard ; and though 
he has not added so much as some have done to the 
stock of bidlion which others afterwards coin and put 
in circulation, there are few who have minted so many 
phrases that are still a part of our daily currency. The 
first line of the following passage has been worn pretty 
smooth, but the succeeding ones are less familiar : — 

" Men are but childi*en of a larger growth, 
Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, 
And full as craving too and full as vain ; 
And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room. 
Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing; 
But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind. 
Works all her folly up and casts it outward 
In the world's open view." :|: 

The image is mixed and even contradictory, but the 
thought obtains grace for it. I feel as if Shakespeare 
would have written seeing for mewing, thus gaining the 

* Don Sebastian. t Cleomenes, % All for Love. 



64 DEYDEN. 

strength of repetition in one verse and avoiding the 
sameness of it in the other. Dryden, I suspect, was not 
much given to correction, and indeed one of the great 
charms of his best writing is that everything seems struck 
off at a heat, as by a superior man in the best mood of 
his talk. Where he rises, he generally becomes fervent 
rather than imaginative j his thought does not incorpo- 
rate itself in metaphor, as in purely poetic minds, but 
repeats and reinforces itself in simile. Where he is im- 
aginative, it is in that lower sense which the poverty of 
our language, for want of a better word, compels us to 
call picturesque, and even then he shows little of that 
finer instinct which suggests so much more than it tells, 
and w^orks the more powerfully as it taxes more the im- 
agination of the reader. In Donne's " Relic " there is 
an example of what T mean. He fancies some one break- 
ing up his grave and spying 

" A bracelet of bright hair about the bone," — 

a verse that still shines there in the darkness of the 
tomb, after two centuries, like one of those inextinguish- 
able lamps whose secret is lost.* Yet Dryden some- 
times showed a sense of this magic of a mysterious hint, 
as in the " Spanish Friar " : — 

" No, I confess, you bade me not in words ; 
The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs, 
And pointed full upon the stroke of murder." 

This is perhaps a solitary example. Nor is he always 
so possessed by the image in his mind as unconsciously 

* Dryden, with his wonted perspicacity, follows Ben Jonson in call- 
ing Donne " the greatest wit, though not the best poet, of our nation." 
(Dedication of Eleonora.) Even as a poet Donne 

" Had in him those brave translunary things 
That our first poets had." 

To open vistas for the imagination through the blind wall of the senses, 
as he could sometimes do, is the supreme function of poetry. 



DRYDEN. 65 

to choose even the picturesquely imaginative word. He 
has done so, however, in this passage from " Marriage 
a la Mode " : — 

" You ne'er must hope again to see your princess, 
Except as prisoners view fair walks and streets. 
And careless passengers going by their grates." 

But after all, he is best upon a level, table-land, it 
is true, and a very high level, but still somewhere be- 
tween the loftier peaks of inspiration and the plain of 
every-day life. In those passages where he moralizes 
he is always good, setting some obvious truth in a new 
light by vigorous phrase and happy illustration. Take 
this (from " (Edipus ") as a proof of it : — 

" The gods are just, 
But how can finite measure infinite? 
Keason ! alas, it does not know itself ! 
Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet 
Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. 
Whatever is, is in its causes just. 
Since all things are by fate. But purblind man 
Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links. 
His eyes not carrjang to that equal beam 
That poises all above." 

From the same play T pick an illustration of that ripened 
sweetness of thought and language which marks the 
natural vein of Dryden. One cannot help applying the 
passage to the late Mr. Quincy : — 

" Of no distemper, of no blast he died. 
But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long, 
E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner; 
Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years ; 
Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more. 
Till, like a clock worn out with eating Time, 
The wheels of weaiy life at last stood still." * 

Here is another of the same kind from "All for Love" : — 

* My own judgment is my sole warrant for attributing these extracts 
from (Edipus to Dryden rather than Lee. 



06 DRYDEN. 

" Gone so soon ! 
Is Death no more ? He used him carelessly, 
With a familiar kindness ; ere he knocked, 
Ean to the door and took him in his arms, 
As who should say, You 're welcome at all hours, 
A friend need give no warning." 

With one more extract from the same play, which 

is in every way his best, for he had, when he wrote it, 

been feeding on the bee-bread of Shakespeare, I shall 

conclude. Antony says, 

" For I am now so sunk from what I was, 
Thou find'st me at my lowest water-mark. 
The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes 
Are all dried up, or take another course : 
What I have left is from my native spring ; 
I 've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate, 
And lifts me to my banks." 

This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what used 
to be called the grand style, at once noble and natural. 
I have not undertaken to analyze any one of the plays, 
for (except in " All for Love ") it would have been only 
to expose their weakness. Dry den had no constructive 
faculty : and in every one of his longer poems that re- 
quired a plot, the plot is bad, always more or less incon- 
sistent with itself, and rather hitched-on to the subject 
than combining with it. It is fair to say, however, 
before leaving this part of Dryden's literary work, that 
Home Tooke thought " Don Sebastian " " the best play 
extant." * Gray admired the plays of Dry den, '' not as 
dramatic compositions, but as poetry." t " There are as 
many things finely said in his plays as almost by any- 
body," said Pope to Spence. Of their rant, their fus- 
tian, their bombast, their bad English, of their innu- 
merable sins against Dryden's own better conscience 
both as poet and critic, I shall excuse myself from 



* Recollections of Rogers, p. 165. 

t Nicholls's Reminiscences of Gray. Pickering's edition of Gray's 
Works, Vol. V. p. 35. 



i 



DRYDEN. 67 

giving any instances.* I like what is good in Dry den 
so much, and it is so good, that I think Gray was justi- 
fied in always losing his temper when he heard " his 
faults criticised." f 

It is as a satirist and pleader in verse that Dryden is 
best known, and as both he is in some respects unrivalled. 
His satire is not so sly as Chaucer's, but it is distin- 
guished by the same good-nature. There is no malice in 
it. I shall not enter into his literary quarrels further 
than to say that he seems to me, on the whole, to have 
been forbearing, which is the more striking as he tells 
us repeatedly that he was naturally vindictive. It v\'as 
he who called revenge " the darling attribute of heaven." 
" I complain not of their lampoons and libels, though I 
have been the public mark for many years. I am vin- 
dictive enough to have repelled force by force, if I could 
imagine that any of them had ever reached me." It 
was this feeling of easy superiority, I suspect, that made 
him the mark for so much jealous vituperation. Scott 
is wrong in attributing his onslaught upon Settle to 
jealousy because one of the latter's plays had been per- 
formed at Court, — an honor never paid to any of Dry- 
den's, $ I have found nothing like a trace of jealousy in 

* Let one suffice for all. In the " Royal Martp-," Porphjnnu^. 
awaiting his execution, says to Maxirain, who had wished him for a 
son-in-law : — 

" Where'er thou stand' st, I '11 level at that place 
My gushing blood, and spout it at thy face ; 
Thus not by marriage we our blood will join ; 
Nay, more, my arms shall throw my head at thine." 
" It is no shame," says Dryden himself, " to be a poet, though it is 
to be a bad one." 

t Gray, ubi supra, p. 38. 

f Scott had never seen Pepys's Diary when he wrote this, or he 
would have left it unwritten : " Fell to discourse of the last night's 
work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of ]\Ionmouth acted tlic 
' Indian Emperor,' wherein tliey told me these things most remarka1)lo 
that not any woman but the Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. Com- 



63 DRYDEN. 

that large and benignant nature. In his vindication of 
the " Duke of Guise," he says, with honest confidence 
in himself : " Nay, I durst almost refer myself to some 
of the angry poets on the other side, whether I have 
not rather countenanced and assisted their beginnings 
than hindered them from rising." He seems to have 
been really as indifferent to the attacks on himself as 
Pope pretended to be. In the same vindication he says 
of the '* Rehearsal," the only one of them that had any 
wit in it, and it has a gi'eat deal : " Much less am I con- 
cerned at the noble name of Ba^'es ; that 's a brat so 
like his own father that he cannot be mistaken for any 
other body. They might as reasonably have called Tom 
Sternhold Virgil, and the resemblance would have held 
as well." In his Essay on Satire he says : '' And yet we 
know that in Christian charity all offences are to be for- 
given as we expect the like pardon for those we daily 
commit against Almighty God. And this consideration 
has often made me tremble when I was saying our Lord's 
Prayer ; for the plain condition of the forgiveness which 
vre beg is the pardoning of others the offences which 
they have done to us ; for v;hich reason I have many 
times avoided the commission of that fault, even when 
I have been notoriously provoked."* And in another 
passage he says, with his usual v\'isdom : " Good sense 
and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant 
world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I 
mean beneficence and candor, is the product of right 
reason, which of necessity will give allowance to the 
failings of others, by considering that there is nothing 

wallis flid anything but like fools and stocks, but that these two did do 
most extraordinary well ; that not any man did anytliing well but Cap- 
tain 0' Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all things did dance 
most incomparably." — 14th Januarj', 1668. 

* See also that noble passage in the " Hind and Panther" (1573- 
1591), where this is put into verse. Drydcn always thought in prose. 



DRYDEN. 69 

perfect in mankind." In the same Essay he gives his 
own receipt for satire : " How easy it is to call rogue and 
villain, and that wittily ! but how hard to make a man 
appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using 
any of those opprobrious terms ! . . . . This is the mys- 
tery of that noble trade Neither is it true that 

this fineness of raillery is offensive : a witty man is 
tickled while he is hurt in this manner, and a fool feels 
it not There is a vast difference between the slov- 
enly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that 
separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing 
in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's 
wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, of a 
bare hanging ; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was 
only belonging to her husband. I wish I could apply it 
to myself, if the reader would be kind enough to think 
it belongs to me. The character of Zimri in my ' Absa- 
lom ' is, in my opinion, worth the whole poem. It is 
not bloody, but it is ridiculous enough, and he for whom 
it was intended was too witty to resent it as an injury. 
.... I avoided the mention of great crimes, and applied 
myself to the representing of blind sides and little ex- 
travagances, to which, the wittier a man is, he is gen- 
rally the more obnoxious." 

Drjden thought his genius led him that way. In his 
elegy on the satirist Oldham, whom Hallam, without read- 
ing him, I suspect, ranks next to Dryden,* he says : — 

" For sure our souls were near allied, and thine 
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine; 
One common note in either lyre did strike, 
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike." 

His practice is not always so delicate as his theory ; but 

* Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epitaphs were 
to be believed even under oath! A great many authors live because 
we read nothing but their tombstones. Oldham was, to borrow one of 
Drj'den's phrases, " a bad or, which is worse, an indifferent poet." 



70 DRYDEN. 

if he was sometimes rough, he never took a base advan- 
tage. He knocks his antagonist down, and there an 
end. Pope seems to have nursed his grudge, and then, 
watching his chance, to have squirted vitriol from behind 
a corner, rather glad than otherwise if it fell on the 
women of those he hated or envied. And if Drjden is 
never dastardly, as Pope often was, so also he never 
wrote anything so maliciously depreciatory as Pope's un- 
provoked attack on Addison. Dryden's satire is often 
coarse, but where it is coarsest, it is commonly in defence 
of himself against attacks that were themselves brutal. 
Then, to be sure, he snatches the first ready cudgel, as 
in Shadwell's case, though even then there is something 
of the good-humor of conscious strength. Pope's provo- 
cation was too often the mere opportunity to say a biting 
thing, where he could do it safely. If his victim showed 
fight, he tried to smooth things over, as with Dennis. 
Dryden could forget that he had ever had a quarrel, but 
he never slunk away from any, least of all from one pro- 
voked by himself.* Pope's satire is too much occupied 
with the externals of manners, habits, personal defects, 
and peculiarities. Dryden goes right to the rooted 
character of the man, to the weaknesses of his nature, 
as where he says of Burnet : — 

" Prompt to assail, and careless of defence, 

Invulnerable in his impudence, 

He dares the world, and, eager of a name, 

He thrusts about and justles into fame. 

So fond of loud report that, not to miss 
' Of being known (his last and utmost bliss), 

He rather would be known for what he is." 

It would be hard to find in Poj^e such compression of 
meaning as in the first, or such penetrative sarcasm as 

* " He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate, 
easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere recou- 
ciliation with them that had offended him." — Congreve. 



DKYDE^. 71 

in the second of the passages I have underscored* 
Dryden's satire is still quoted for its comprehensiveness 
of application, Pope's rather for the elegance of its finish 
and the point of its phrase than for any deeper qual- 
ities.* I do not remember that Dry den ever makes 
poverty a reproach.f He was above it, alike by generos- 
ity of birth and mind. Pope is always the ixirvenit^ 
always giving himself the airs of a fine gentleman, and, 
like Horace Walpole and Byron, affecting superiority to 
professional literature. Dryden, like Lessing, was a 
hack-writer, and was proud, as an honest man has a 
right to be, of being able to get his bread by his brains. 
He lived in Grub Street all his life, and never dreamed 
that where a man of genius lived was not the best 
quarter of the town. " Tell his Majesty," said sturdy 
old Jonson, " that his soul lives in an alley." 

Dryden's prefaces are a mine of good writing and 
judicious criticism. His ohiter dicta have often the pen- 
etration, and always more than the equity, of Voltaire's, 
for Dryden never loses temper, and never altogether 
qualifies his judgment by his self-love. " He was a more 
universal writer than Voltaire," said Home Tooke, and 
perhaps it is true that he had a broader view, though 
his learning was neither so extensive nor so accurate. 

* Coleridge says excellently: "You will find this a good gauge or 
criterion of genius, — whether it progi-esses and evolves, or only spins 
upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri; every line adds to 
or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the 
very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three 
couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty ©r thirty 
lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealous}'', 
or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized." (Table-Talk, 192.) 
Some of Dryden's best satirical hits are let fall by seeming accident in 
his prose, as where he says of his Protestant assailants, " Most of them 
love all whores but her of Babylon." They had first attacked him on 
the score of his private morals. 

t That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming exception, as any 
careful reader will see. 



72 DRYDEN. 

My space will not aiford many extracts, but I cannot 
forbear one or two. He says of Chaucer, that " he is a 
perpetual fountain of good sense," * and likes him better 
than Ovid, — a bold confession in that day. He prefers 
the pastorals of Theocritus to those of Virgil. " Virgil's 
shepherds are too well read in the philosophy of Epicurus 
and of Plato " ; " there is a kind of rusticity in all those 
pompous verses, somewhat of a holiday shepherd strut- 
ting in his country buskins ";t "Theocritus is softer 
than Ovid, he touches the passions more delicately, and 
performs all this out of his own fund, without diving 
into the arts and sciences for a supply. Even his Doric 
dialect has an incomparable sweetness in his clownish- 
ness, like a fair shepherdess, in her country russet, 
talking in a Yorkshire tone."$ Comparing Virgil's verse 
with that of some other poets, he says, that his " num- 
bers are perpetually varied to increase the delight of the 
reader, so that the same sounds are never repeated twice 
together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though 
they write in styles different from each other, yet have 
each of them but one sort of music in their verses. All 
the versification and little variety of Claudian is included 
within the compass of four or five lines, and then he 
begins again in the same tenor, perpetually closing his 
sense at the end of a verse, and that verse commonly 
which they call golden, or two substantives and two 
adjectives with a verb betwixt them to keep the peace. 
Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of 
numbers and sound as he ; he is always, as it were, upon 
the hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground." § 
What a dreary half-century would have been saved to 
English poetry, could Pope have laid these sentences to 
heart ! Upon translation, no one has written so much 

* Preface to Fables. J Preface to Second Miscellany, 

t Dedication of the Georgics. § Ibid. 



DRYDEN. 73 

and so well as Dryden in his various prefaces. What- 
ever has been said since is either expansion or variation 
of what he had said before. His general theory may be 
stated as an aim at something between the literalness of 
metaphrase and the looseness of paraphase. " Where I 
have enlarged," he says, '' I desire the false critics would 
not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, 
but either they are secretly in the 2>oet, or may be fairly 
deduced from him." Coleridge, with his usual cleverness 
of assiinilation, has condensed him in a letter to Words- 
worth : " There is no medium betw^een a prose version 
and one on the avowed principle of compensation in the 
widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect." * 

I have selected these passages, not because they are 
the best, but because they have a near application to 
Dryden himself His own characterization of Chaucer 
(though too narrow for the greatest but one of English 
poets) is the best that could be given of himself : "He is 
a perpetual fountain of good sense." And the other pas- 
sages show him a close and open-minded student of 
the art he professed. Has his influence on our litera- 
ture, but especially on oiu* poetry, been on the whole for 
good or evil 1 If he could have been read with the 
liberal understanding which he brought to the works of 
others, I should answer at once that it had been benefi- 
cial. But his translations and paraphrases, in some 
ways the best things he did, were done, like his plays, 
under contract to deliver a certain number of verses for 
a specified sum. The versification, of which he had 
learned the art by long practice, is excellent, but his 
haste has led him to fill out the measure of lines with 
phrases that add only to dilute, and thus the clearest, 
the most direct, the most manly versifier of his time be- 
came, without meaning it, the source {fons et origo ma- 

* Jlemoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. p. 74 (American edition). 
4 



74 DilVDEN. 

lorum) of that pdetic diction from whicli our poetry has 
not even yet recovered. I do not like to say it, but he 
has sometimes smothered the childlike simplicity of 
Chaucer under feather-beds of verbiage. What this 
kind of thing came to in the next century, when every- 
body ceremoniously took a bushel-basket to bring a 
wren's Qgg to market in, is only too sadly familiar. It is 
clear that his natural taste led Dryden to prefer direct- 
ness and simplicity of style. If he was too often 
tempted astray by Artifice, his love of Nature betrays 
itself in many an almost passionate outbreak of angry 
remorse. Addison tells us that he took particular de- 
light in the reading of our old English ballads. What 
he valued above all things was Force, though in his haste 
he is willing to make a shift with its counterfeit. Effect. 
As usual, he had a good reason to urge for what he 
did : "I will not excuse, but justify myself for one pre- 
tended crime for which I am liable to be charged by 
false critics, not only in this translation, but in many of 
my original poems, — that I Latinize too much. It is 
true that when I find an English word significant and 
sounding, I neither borrow from the Latin or any other 
language ; but when I want at home I must seek abroad. 
If sounding words are not of our growth and manufac- 
ture, who shall hinder me to import them from a foreigTi 
country? I carry not out the treasure of the nation 
which is never to retiu-n ; but what I bring from Italy I 
spend in England : here it remains, and here it circu- 
lates ; for if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand 
to another. I trade both with the living and the dead 
for the enrichment of our native language. We have 
enough in England to supply our necessity ; but if we 
will have things of magnificence and splendor, we must 

get them by commerce Therefore, if I find a word 

in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by 



DRYDEN. 75 

using it myself, and if the public approve of it the bill 
passes. But every man cannot distinguish betwixt 
pedantry and poetry ; every man, therefore^ is not fit 
to innovate." * This is admirably said, and with Dry- 
den's accustomed penetration to the root of the matter. 
The Latin has given us most of our canorous w^ords, only 
they must not be confounded w^ith merely sonorous ones, 
still less with phrases that, instead of supplementing the 
sense, encumber it. It was of Latinizing in this sense 
that Dryden was guilty. Instead of stabbing, he " with 
steel invades the life." The consequence w^as that by 
and by we have Dr. Johnson's poet, Savage, telling us, — 

" In front, a parlor meets my entering view, 
Opposed a room to sweet refection due " ; 

Dr. Blacklock making a forlorn maiden say of her " dear," 
who is out late, — 

" Or by some apoplectic fit deprest 
Perhaps, alas ! he seeks eternal rest " ; 

and Mr. Bruce, in a Danish war-song, calling on the vi- 
kings to " assume their oars." But it must be admitted 
of Dryden that he seldom makes the second verse of a 
couplet the mere trainbearer to the first, as Pope was 
continually doing. In Dryden the rhyme waits upon 
the thought ; in Pope and his school the thought courte- 
sies to the tune for which it is written. 

Dryden has also been blamed for his gallicisms, f He 
tried some, it is true, but they have not been accepted. 

* A Discourse of Epick Poetry. <' If the public approve." " On ne 
peut pas admettre dans le ddveloppement des langues aucune r^vo- 
lution artificielle et sciemment executee; il n'y a pour elles ni conciles, 
ni assemblies d^libdrantes ; on ne les rdforme pas comme une consti- 
tution vicieuse." — Kenan, De I'Origine du Langage, p. 95. 

t This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such innovation " 
in Elizabeth's time, and Carew in James's. A language gi-ows, and is 
not made. Almost all the new-fangled words with which Jonsou 
taxes Marston iu his " Poetaster" are now current. 



76 DEYDEN. 

I do not think he added a single word to the language, 
unless, as I suspect, he first used magnetism in its pres- 
ent sense of moral attraction. What he did in his best 
writing was to use the English as if it were a spoken, 
and not merely an inkhorn language ; as if it were his 
own to do what he pleased with it, as if it need not be 
ashamed of itself* In this respect, his service to our 
prose was greater than any other man has ever rendered. 
He says he formed his style upon Tillotson's (Bossuet, 
on the other hand, formed his upon Corneille's) ; but I 
rather think he got it at Will's, for its great charm is 
that it has the various freedom of talk.f In verse, he 
had a pomp which, excellent in itself, became pompous- 
ness in his imitators. But he had nothing of Milton's 
ear for various rhythm and interwoven harmony. He 
knew how to give new modulation, sweetness, and force 
to the pentameter ; but in what used to be called pin- 
darics, I am heretic enough to think he generally failed. 
His so much praised " Alexander's Feast " (in parts of 
it, at least) has no excuse for its slovenly metre and 
awkward expression, but that it was written for music. 
He himself tells us, in the epistle dedicatory to " King 
Arthur," " that the numbers of poetry and vocal music 
are sometimes so contrary, that in many places I have 
been obliged to cramp my verses and make them rugged 

* Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, he 
knew very little about the language historically or critically. His 
prose and poetry swarm with locutions that Avould have made Lindley 
]\Iurray's hair stand on end. Hoio little he knew is plain from his criti- 
cising in Ben Jonson the use of ones m the plural, of " Though Heaven 
should speak with all his wrath," and be " as false English for are, 
though the rhyme hides it." Yet all are good English, and I have 
found them all in Dryden's own ^\Titing! Of his sins against idiom I 
have a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one of our 
liighest authorities for real English. 

t To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one hand, and 
vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom Brown — if you can. 



DRYDEN. 77 

to the reader that they may be harmonious to the 
hearer." His renowned ode suffered from this constraint, 
but this is no apology for the vulgarity of conception in 
too many passages.* 

Dryden's conversion to Romanism has been commonly 
taken for gi-anted as insincere, and has therefore left an 
abiding stain on his character, though the other mud 
thrown at him by angry opponents or rivals binished off 
so soon as it was dry. But I think his change of faith 
susceptible of several explanations, none of them in any 
way discreditable to him. Where Church and State are 
habitually associated, it is natural that minds even of a 
high order should unconsciously come to regard religion 
as only a subtler mode of police, f Dry den, conservative 
by nature, had discovered before Joseph de Maistre, that 
Protestantism, so long as it justified its name by con- 
tinuing to be an active principle, was the abettor of Re- 
publicanism. I think this is hinted in more than one 
passage in his preface to " The Hind and Panther." 
He may very well have preferred Romanism because of 
its elder claim to authority in all matters of doctrine, 
but I think he had a deeper reason in the constitution 
of his own mind. That he was " naturally inclined to 
scepticism in philosophy," he tells \is of himself in the 
preface to the " Religio Laici " ; but he was a sceptic 

* " Cette ode mise en musiqiie par Purcell (si je ne me trompe), 
passe en Angleten*e pour le chef-'d'oeu\Te de la poesie la pins sublime 
et la plus varice; et je vous avoue que, comma je sais mieux I'anglais 
que le grec, j'aime cent fois mieux cette ode que tout Pindare." — 
VoLTAiHE to M. DE Chabanon, 9 mars, 1772. 

Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. When Chief-Justice Mar- 
lay, then a young Templar, " congratulated him on having produced 
the finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any language, 
* You are right, young gentleman ' (replied Dryden), 'a nobler Ode 
never was produced, nor ever vnlL'' " — Malone. 

t This Avas true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more of Souther, 
who in some respects was not unlike Dryden. 



78 DRYDEN. 

with an imaginative side, and in such characters scepti- 
cism and superstition play into each other's hands. This 
finds a curious iUustration in a letter to his sons, written 
four years before his death : '' Towards the latter end of 
this month, September, Charles will begin to recover his 
perfect health, according to his Nativity, which, casting 
it myself, I am sure is true, and all things hitherto have 
happened accordingly to the very time that I predicted 
them." Have we forgotten Montaigne's votive offerings 
at the shrine of Loreto 1 

Dryden was short of body, inclined to stoutness, and 
florid of complexion. He is said to have had " a sleepy 
eye," but was handsome and of a manly carriage. He 
"was not a very genteel man, he was intimate with 
none but poetical men.* He was said to be a very good 
man by all that knew him : he was as plump as Mr. 
Pitt, of a fresh color and a down look, and not very 
conversible." So Pope described him to Spence. He 
still reigns in literary tradition, as when at Will's his 
elbow-chair had the best place by the fire in winter, or 
on the balcony in summer, and when a pinch from his 
snuff-box made a young author blush with j)leasure as 
would now-a-days a favorable notice in the " Saturday 
Review." What gave and secures for him this singular 
eminence 1 To put it in a single word, I think that his 
qualities and faculties were in that rare combination 
which makes character. This gave flavor to whatever 
he wrote, — a very rare quality. 

Was he, then, a great poet ? Hardly, in the narrow- 

* Pope's notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter from 
Lord Cobham to him : " I congratulate you upon the fine weather. 
'T is a strange thing that people of condition and men of parts must 
enjoy it in common with the rest of the world." (Ruffhead's Pope, 
p. 276, note.) His Lordship's naive distinction between people of con- 
dition and men of parts is as good as Pope's between genteel and po- 
etical men. I fancy the poet grinning savagely as he read it. 



DRYDEN. 79 

est definition. But he was a strong thinker who some- 
times carried common sense to a height where it catches 
the hght of a diviner air, and warmed reason till it had 
wellnigh the illuminating property of intuition. Cer- 
tainly he is not, like Spenser, the poets' poet, but other 
men have also their rights. Even the Philistine is a 
man and a brother, and is entirely right so far as he 
sees. To demand more of him is to be unreasonable. 
And he sees, among other things, that a man who under- 
takes to write should first have a meaning perfectly de- 
fined to himself, and then should be able to set it forth 
clearly in the best words. This is precisely Dryden's 
praise,* and amid the rickety sentiment looming big 
through misty phrase which marks so much of modern 
literature, to read him is as bracing as a northwest wind. 
He blows the mind clear. In ripeness of mind and blufi" 
heartiness of expression, he takes rank with the best. 
His phrase is always a short-cut to his sense, for his es- 
tate was too spacious for him to need that trick of wind- 
ing the path of his thought about, and planting it out 
with clumps of epithet, by which the landscape-gar- 
deners of literature give to a paltry half-acre the air of a 
park. In poetry, to be next-best is, in one sense, to be 
nothing ; and yet to be among the first in any kind of 
writing, as Dryden certainly was, is to be one of a very 
small company. He had, beyond most, the gift of the 
right word. And if he does not, like one or two of the 
greater masters of song, stir our sympathies by that in- 
definable aroma so magical in arousing the subtile asso- 
ciations of the soul, he has this in common with the 
few great writers, that the winged seeds of his thought 
embed themselves in the memory and germinate there. 
If I could be guilty of the absurdity of recommending 

* " Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, "that is not just and 
proper." 



80 DRYDEN. 

to a young man any author on whom to form his style, 
I should tell him that, next to having something that 
will not stay unsaid, he could find no safer guide than 
Dryden. 

Cowper, in a letter to Mr. Unwin (5th January, 1782), 
expresses what I think is the common feeling about 
Dryden, that, with all his defects, he had that indefina- 
ble something w^e call Genius. " But I admire Dryden 
most [he had been speaking of Pope], who has succeeded 
by mere dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness and a 
carelessness almost peculiar to himself. His faults are 
numberless, and so are his beauties. His faults are those 
of a great man, and his beauties are such (at least 
sometimes) as Pope with all his touching and retouching 
could never equal." But, after all, perhaps no man has 
summed him up so well as John Dennis, one of Pope's 
typical dunces, a dull man outside of his own sphere, 
as men are apt to be, but who had some sound notions 
as a critic, and thus became the object of Pope's fear 
and therefore of his resentment. Dennis speaks of him 
as his "departed friend, whom I infinitely esteemed 
when living for the solidity of his thought, for the spring 
and the warmth and the beautiful turn of it ; for the 
power and variety and fulness of his harmony ; for the 
purity, the perspicuity, the energy of his expression ; 
and, whenever these great qualities are required, for the 
pomp and solemnity and majesty of his style." * 

* Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715. 



WITCHCRAFT. 



Credulity, as a mental and moral phenomenon, mani- 
fests itself in widely different ways, according as it 
chances to be the daughter of fancy or terror. The one 
lies warm about the heart as Folk-lore, fills moonlit dells 

* Salem Witchcraft, with an Account of' Salem Village, and a His- 
tory of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects. By Charles 
W. Ui'HAM. Boston: Wiggin and Lunt. 1867. 2 vols. 

IoAN>-is WiEKi de praestigiis daemonum. et incantationibus ac vene- 
ficiis libri sex, postrema editione sexta aucti et recogniti. Accessit 
liber apologeticus et pseudomonarchia daemonum. Cum rerum et ver- 
borum copioso indice. Cum Caes. IMaiest. Regisq; Galliarum gratia 
et privelegio. Basilige ex ofRcina Oporiniani, 1583. 

Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft: proving the common opinions of 
Witches contracting with Divels, Spirits, or Familiars ; and their power 
to kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men, women, and children, 
or other creatures by diseases or otherwise ; their flying in the Air, &c. ; 
To be but imaginary Erronious conceptions and novelties; Wherein 
also the lewde, unchristian practises of Witchmongers, upon aged, 
melancholy, ignorant and superstitious people in extorting confessions 
by inhumane terrors and Tortures, is notably detected. Also The knav- 
ery and confederacy of Conjixrors. The impious blasphemy of In- 
chanters. The impostm-e of Soothsayers, and infidelity of Atheists. 
The delusion of Pythonists, Figure-castei's, Asti'ologers, and vanity of 
Dreamers. The fruitlesse beggarly art of Alchimistry. The horrible 
art of Poisoning and all the tricks and conveyances of juggling and lieger- 
demain are fully deciphered. With many other things opened that 
have long lain hidden : though very necessary to be known for the un- 
deceiving of -Judges, Justices, and Juries, and for the preservation of 
poor, aged, deformed, ignorant people; fi*equently taken, arraigned, 
condemned and executed for Witches, when according to a right un- 
derstanding, and a good conscience, Physick, Food, and necessaries 
4* F 



82 WITCHCRAFT. 

with dancing fairies, sets out a meal for the Brownie, 
hears the tinkle of airy bridle-bells as Tamlane rides 
away with the Queen of Dreams, changes Pluto and 

should be administered to him. Whereunto is added a treatise upon 
the nature and substance of Spirits and Divels &c., all written and 
published in Anno 1584. By IiEGIXALd Scot, Esquire. Printed by 
R. C. and are to be sold by Giles Calvert dwelling at the Black Spread- 
Eagle, at the West-End of Pauls, 1651. 

De la Demonomanie des Sorciers. A Monseigneur ^I. Chrestofe 
DE Thou, Chevalier, Seigneur de Cceli, premier President en la Cour 
de Parlement et Conseiller du Roy en son prive Conseil. Reveu, 
Corrige, et augmente d'une grande partie. Par I. Bodin Angevin. 
A Paris : Chez lacques Du Puys, Libraire lurd, a la Samaritaine. 
M.D.LXXXVII. Avec privilege du Roy. 

Magica, sen mirabiliura historiarum de Spectris et Apparitionibus 
spirituum: Item, de magicis et diabolicis incantationibus. De Mira- 
culis, Oraculis, Vaticiniis, Divinationibus, Pradictionibus, Revelatio- 
nibus ct aliis eiusmodi multis ac varijs praestigijs, ludibrijs et imposturis 
malorum Dsemonum. Libri II. Ex probatis et fide dignis historiarum 
scriptoribus diligenter collecti. Islebite, cura, Typis et sumptibus 
Henningi Grossij Bibl. Lipo. 1597. Cum privilegio. 

The displaying of supposed Witchcraft wherein is affirmed that there 
are many sorts of Deceivers and Impostoi's, and divers persons under a 
passive delusion of INIelancholy and Fancy. But that there is a cor- 
poreal league made betwixt the Devil and the Witch, or that he sucks 
on the Witch's body, has carnal copulation, or that Witches are turned 
into Cats, Dogs, raise Tempests or the like is utterly denied and dis- 
proved. Wherein i? also handled. The existence of Angels and Spirits, 
the truth of Apparitions, the Nature of Astral and Sydereal Spirits, the 
force of Charms and Philters; with other abstruse matters. By John 
Webster, Practitioner in Physick. Falsa etenim opiniones Hominum 
non solum surdos sed et coecos faciunt, ita ut videre nequeant quse 
aliis perspicua apparent. Galen, lib. 8, de Comp. ^Med. London: 
Printed by 1. M. and are to be sold by the booksellers in London. 
1677. 

Sadducismus Triumphatus : or Full and Plain Evidence concerning 
Witches and Apparitions. In two Parts. The First treating of their 
Possibility; the Second of their Real Existence. By Joseph Glan- 
viL, late Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty, and Fellow of the Roy- 
al Society. The third edition. The advantages whereof above the 
former, the Reader may understand out of D*" H. ]More's Account pre- 
fixed thenmto. With tAvo Authentick, but wonderful Stories of cer- 
tain Swedish' Witches. Done into English by A. Horneck DD. Lon- 
don, Printed for S. L. and are to be sold by Anth. Baskervillo at the 
Bible, the corner of Essex-street, without Temple-Bar. M.DCLXXXIX. 



WITCHCRAFT. 83 

Proserpine into Oberon and Titania, and makes friends 
with unseen powers as Good Follv ; the other is a bird 
of night, whose shadow sends a chill among the roots 

Demonologie ou Traitte des Demons et Sorciers : T>Q leur puissance 
et impuissance : Par Fr. Pekraud. Ensemble L'Antidemon de 
]\Iascon, ou Histoire Veritable de ce qu'un Demon a fait et dit, il y a 
qnelques annees en la maison dudit S"" PeiTeaud a Mascon. I. 
Jacques iv. 7, 8. " Resistez an Diable, et il s'enfuira de vous. Ap- 
prochez vous de Dieu, et il s'approchera de vous." A Geneve, chez 
Pien-e Aubert. M,DC,LIII. 

The Wonders of the Invisible World. Being an account of the try- 
als of several witches lately executed in J^ew-England. By CoTTO?f 
Mather, D. D. To which is added a farther account of the tryals of 
the New England Witches. By I^tcrease Mather, D. D., President of 
Han-ard College. London ; John Russell Smith, Soho Square. 1862. 
(First printed in Boston, 1692.) 

I. X. D. N. J. C. Dissertatio Juridica de Lamiis earumque processu 
criminali, ^on ^;)i):en unt> ^em \mnl. ^vojcfi iDt&ev Mefdtien, Quam, 
auxiliante Divina Gratia, Consensu et Authoritate Magnifici JCtorum 
Ordinis in illustribus Athenis Salanis sub pra^sidio Magnifici, Nobilis- 
simi, Amplissimi, Consultissimi, atque Excellentissimi Dn. Ernesti 
Frider. ©cljrotcr hereditarii in QCicferflatit, JCti et Antecessoris hujus 
Salante Famigeratissimi, Consiliarii Saxonici, Curiae Provincialis, Fa- 
cultatis Juridicce, et Scabinatus Assessoris longe Gravissimi, Domini 
Patroni Prreceptoris et Promotoris sui nuUo non honoris et observantite 
cidtu sancte devenerandi, colendi, publico Eruditorima censure subjicit 
Michael Paris 2Ba(bufk}er, Groebziga Anhaltinns, in Acroaterio JCtorum 
ad diem 1. Maj. A. 1670. Editio Tertia, Jenas, Typis Pauli Ehrichii. 
1707. 

Histoire de Diables de Loudun, on de la Possession des Religieuses 
Ursulines, etde la condemniition et dusuplice d'Urbain Grandier, Cure 
de la meme ville. Cruels eft'ets de la Vengeance du Cardinal de Riche- 
lieu. A Amsterdam Aux depens de la Compagnie. M.DCC.LII. 

A view of the Invisible World, or General History' of Apparitions, 
Collected from the best Authorities, both Antient and Modern, and at- 
tested by Authors of the highest Reputation and Credit. Illustrated 
Avith a Variety of Notes and parallel Cases ; in which some Account 
of the Nature and Cause of Departed Spirits visiting their fonner Sta- 
tions by returning again into the present World, is treated in a Manner 
different to the prevailing Opinions of Mankind. And an Attempt is 
made from Rational Principles to account for the Species of such su- 
pernatural Appearances, when they may be snppos'd consistent with 
the Divine Appointment in the Government of the World. With the 
sentiments of Monsieur Le Clerc, My. Locke, jNIr. Addison, and 
Otliers on this important Subject. In which some humorous and di- 



84 WITCHCRAFT. 

of the hair : it sucks with the vampire, gorges with the 
ghoule, is choked by the night-hag, pines away under the 
witch's charm, and commits uncleanness with the em- 
bodied Principle of Evil, giving up the fair realm of 
innocent belief to a murky throng from the slums and 
stews of the debauched brain. Both have vanished from 
among educated men, and such superstition as comes to 
the surface now-a-days is the harmless Jacobitism of senti- 
ment, pleasing itself with the fiction all the more be- 
cause there is no exacting reality behind it to impose a 
duty or demand a sacrifice. And as Jacobitism survived 
the Stuarts, so this has outlived the dynasty to which it 
professes an after-dinner allegiance. It nails a horseshoe 
over the door, but keeps a rattle by its bedside to sum- 
mon a more substantial watchman ; it hangs a crape on 
the beehives to get a taste of ideal sweetness, but obeys 
the teaching of the latest bee-book for material and 
marketable honey. This is the aesthetic variety of the 
malad}^, or rather, perhaps, it is only the old complaint 
robbed of all its pain,^ and lapped in waking dreams by 

verting instances are remarked, in order to divert that Gloom of Melan- 
clioly tliat naturally arises in the Human I\Iind, from reading or medi- 
tating on such Subjects. Illustrated with suitable Cuts. London: 
Printed in the year M,DCC,LII. [Mainly from DeFoe's " History of 
Apparitions."] 

Satan's Invisible World discovered ; or, a choice Collection of ]\Iod- 
ern Relations, proving evidently, against the Atheists of this present 
Age, that there are Devils, Spirits, Witches and Apparitions, from 
Authentic Records, Attestations of Witnesses, and undoubted Verity. 
To -which is added that marvellous History of JMajor Weir and his Sis- 
ter, the Witches of Balgarran, Pittenweem and Calder, &c. By Geokge 
Sinclair, late Professor of Philosophy in Glasgow. No man should 
be vain that he can injure the merit of a Book; for the meanest rogue 
may burn a City or kill a Hero; whereas he coidd never build the one, 
or equal the other. Sir Geoi-ge M'Kenzie, Edinburgh: Sold by P. 
Anderson, Parliament Square. M.DCC.LXXX. 

La Magie et I'Astrologie dans I'Antiquitd et au Moyen Age, ou 
Etude sur les superstitions paiennes qui se sont perpdtu(''es jusqu'a nos 
jours. Par L. F. Alfued ]\Iaury. Troisieme Edition revue et 
corrigee. Paris: Pidier. 1864. 



WITCHCRAFT. 8^ 

the narcotism of an age of science. To the world at 
large it is not undelightful to see the poetical instincts 
of friends and neighbors finding some other vent than 
that of verse. But there has been a superstition of very 
different fibre, of more intense and practical validity, the 
deformed child of faith, peopling the midnight of the 
mind with fearful shapes and phrenetic suggestions, a 
monstrous brood of its own begetting, and making even 
good men ferocious in imagined self-defence. 

Imagination, has always been, and still is, in a nar- 
rower sense, the great mythologizer; but both its mode of 
manifestation and the force with which it reacts on the 
mind are one thing in its crude form of childlike wonder, 
and another thing after it has been more or less con- 
sciously manipulated by the poetic faculty. A mythol- 
ogy that broods over us in our cradles, that mingles with 
the lullaby of the nurse and the winter-evening legends 
of the chimney-corner, that brightens day with the pos- 
sibility of divine encounters, and darkens night with in- 
timations of demonic ambushes, is of other substance 
than one which we take down from our bookcase, sapless 
as the shelf it stood on, and remote from all present 
sympathy with man or nature as a town history. It is 
something like the difference between live metaphor and 
dead personification. Primarily, the action of the im- 
agination is the same in the mythologizer and the poet, 
that is, it forces its own consciousness on the objects of 
the senses, and compels them to sympathize with its own 
momentary impressions. When Shakespeare in his " Lu- 
crece " makes 

" The threshold grate the door to have him heard," 

his mind is acting under the same impulse that first en- 
dowed with human feeling and then with human shape 
all the invisible forces of nature, and called into being 
those 



86 "WITCHCRAFT. 

" Fair humanities of old religion," 

whose loss the poets mourn. So also Shakespeare no 
doubt projected himself in his own creations ; but those 
creations never became so perfectly disengaged from 
him, so objective, or, as they used to say, extrinsical, to 
him, as to react upon him like real and even alien exist- 
ences. I mean permanently, for momentarily they may 
and must have done so. But before man's conscious- 
ness had wholly disentangled itself from outward ob- 
jects, all nature was but a many-sided mirror which 
gave back to him a thousand images more or less beau- 
tified or distorted, magnified or diminished, of himself, 
till his imagination gTcw to look upon its own incorpo- 
rations as having an independent being. Thus, by 
degrees, it became at last passive to its own creations. 
You may see imaginative children every day anthropo- 
morphizing in this way, and the dupes of that super- 
abundant vitality in themselves, which bestows qualities 
proper to itself on everything about them. There is a 
period of development in which grown men are child- 
like. In such a period the fables which endow beasts 
with human attributes first gi^ew up ; and we luckily 
read them so early as never to become suspicious of any 
absurdity in them. The Finnic epos of " Kalewala " is 
a curious illustration of the same fact. In that every- 
thing has the affections, passions, and consciousness of 
men. When the mother of Lemminkainen is seeking 
her lost son, — 

" Sought she many days the lost one, 
Sought him ever without finding; 
Then the roadways come to meet her. 
And she asks them with beseeching: 
* Roadways, ye whom God hath shapen, 
Have ye not my son beholden, 
Nowhere seen the golden apple, 
Him, my darling staff of silver? ' 



WITCHCRAFT. . 87 

Prudently they gave her answer, 
Thus to her rephed the roadways: 
' For thy son we cannot plague us, 
We have sorroAvs too, a many. 
Since our own lot is a hard one 
And our fortune is but evil, 
By dog's feet to be run over, 
By the wheel-tire to be wounded, 
And by heavy heels down-trampled.' " 

It is in this tendency of the mind under certain con- 
ditions to confound the objective with subjective, or 
rather t6 mistake the one for the other, that Mr. Tylor, 
in his " Early History of Mankind," is fain to seek the 
origin of the supernatural, as we somewhat vaguely 
call whatever transcends our ordinary experience. And 
this, no doubt, will in many cases account for the par- 
ticular shapes assumed by certain phantasmal appear- 
ances, though I am inclined to doubt whether it be a 
sufficient explanation of the abstract phenomenon. It 
is easy for the arithmetician to make a key to the prob- 
lems that he has devised to suit himself. An imme- 
diate and habitual confusion of the kind spoken of is 
insanity ; and the hypochondriac is tracked by the black 
dog of his own mind. Disease itself is, of course, in 
one sense natural, as being the result of natural causes ; 
but if we assume health as the mean representing the 
normal poise of all the mental faculties, we must be 
content to call hypochondria subternatural, because the 
tone of the instrument is lowered, and to designate as 
supernatural only those ecstasies in which the mind, 
under intense but not unhealthy excitement, is snatched 
sometimes above itself, as in poets and other persons of 
imaginative temperament. In poets this liability to be 
possessed by the creations of their own brains is limited 
and proportioned by the artistic sense, and the imagina- 
tion thus truly becomes the shaping faculty, while in 
less regulated or coarser organizations it dwells forever 



88 WITCHCRAFT. 

in the Kifelheim of phantasmagoria and dream, a thau- 
maturge half cheat, half dupe. What Mr. Tylor has 
to say on this matter is ingenious and full of valuable 
suggestion, and to a certain extent solves our difficulties. 
Nightmare, for example, will explain the testimony of 
witnesses in trials for witchcraft, that they had been 
hag-ridden by the accused. But to prove the possibility, 
nay, the probability, of this confusion of objective with 
subjective is not enough. It accounts very well for 
such ajDparitions as those which appeared to Dion, to 
Brutus, and to Curtius Rufus. In such cases the im- 
agination is undoubtedly its own doppel-g anger, and 
sees nothing more than the projection of its own deceit. 
But I am puzzled, I confess, to explain the appearance 
of the first ghost, especially among men who thought 
death to be the end-all here below. The thing once 
conceived of, it is easy, on Mr. Tyler's theory, to ac- 
count for all after the first. If it was originally believed 
that only the spirits of those who had died violent 
deaths were permitted to wander, * the conscience of a 
remorseful murderer may have been haimted by the 
memory of his victim, till the imagination, infected in 
its turn, gave outward reality to the image on. the in- 
ward eye. After putting to death Boetius and Sym- 
machus, it is said that Theodoric saw in the head of a 

* Lucian, in his "Liars," puts this opinion into the mouth of Ai'ig- 
notus. The theory by which Lucretius seeks to explain apparitions, 
though materialistic, seems to allow some influence also to the work- 
ing of imagination. It is hard otherwise to explain how his simulacra 
(which are not unlike the astral spirits bf later times) should appear in 
dreams. 

Quae simulacra .... 
.... nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes 
terrificant atque in somnis, cum saepe figuras 
contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum 
quae nos horrifice languentis saepe sopore 

De Eer. Nat. IV. 33 - 37, ed. Munro. 



WITCHCRAFT. 89 

fish sensed at his dinner the face of Symmachus, grin- 
ning horribly and with flaming eyes, whereupon he 
took to his bed and died soon after in gi'eat agony of 
mind. It is not safe, perhaps, to beheve all that is re- 
ported of an Arian ; but supposing thoistory to bo true, 
there is only a short step from such a delusion of the 
senses to the complete ghost of popular legend. But, 
in some of the most trustworthy stories of apparitions, 
they have shown themselves not only to persons who 
had done them no WTong in the flesh, but also to such 
as had never even known them. The eidolon of James 
Haddock appeared to a man named Taverner, that he 
might interest himself in recovering a piece of land un- 
justly kept from the dead man's infant son. If we may 
trust Defoe, Bishop Jeremy Taylor twice examined 
Taverner, and was convinced of the truth of his story. 
In this case, Taverner had formerly known Haddock. 
But the apparition of an old gentleman which entered 
the learned Dr. Scott's study, and directed him where 
to find a missing deed needful in settling what had late- 
ly been its estate in the West of England, chose for its 
attorney in the business an entire stranger, who had 
never even seen its original in the flesh. 

Whatever its origin, a belief in spirits seems to have 
been common to all the nations of the ancient world 
who have left us any record of themselves. Ghosts be- 
gan to walk early, and are walking still, in spite of the 
shrill cock-crow of wir hahenja aufgehldrt. Even the 
ghost in chains, which one would naturally take to be a 
fashion peculiar to convicts escaped from purgatory, is 
older than the belief in that reforming penitentiary. 
The younger Pliny tells a very good story to this efl'ect : 
" There was at Athens a large and spacious house which 
lay under the disrepute of being haunted. In the dead 
of the night a noise resembling the clashing of iron 



90 WITCHCRAFT. 

was frequently heared, which, if you listened more atten- 
tively, sounded like the rattling of chains ; at first it 
seemed at a distance, but approached nearer by degrees ; 
immediately afterward a spectre appeared, in the form 
of an old man, extremely meagre and ghastly, with a 
long beard and dishevelled hair, rattling the chains on 

his feet and hands By this means the house 

w^as at last deserted, being judged by everybody to be 
absolutely uninhabitable ; so that it was now entirely 
abandoned to the ghost. However, in hopes that some 
tenant might be found who was ignorant of this great 
calamity which attended it, a bill was put up giving 
notice that it was either to be let or sold. It happened 
that the philosopher Athenodorus came to Athens at 
this time, and, reading the bill, inquired the price. The 
extraordinary cheapness raised his suspicion; neverthe- 
less, when he heared the whole story, he was so far from 
being discouraged that he was more strongly inclined to 
hire it, and, in short, actually did so. When it grew to- 
wards evening, he ordered a couch to be prepared for 
him in the fore part of the house, and, after calling for 
a light, together with his pen and tablets, he directed 
all his people to retire. But that his mind might not, 
for want of employment, be open to the vain terrors of 
imaginary noises and spirits, he applied himself to 
writing with the utmost attention. The first part of 
the night passed with usual silence, w^hen at length 
the chains began to rattle ; however, he neither lifted up 
his eyes nor laid down his pen, but diverted "his obser- 
vation by pursuing his studies with greater earnestness. 
The noise increased, and advanced nearer, till it seemed 
at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked up 
and saw the ghost exactly in the manner it had been 
described to him ; it stood before him, beckoning wdth 
the finger. Athenodorus made a sign with his hand 



WITCHCRAFT. 91 

that it should wait a little, and threw his eyes again 
upon his papers ; but the ghost still rattling his chains 
in his ears, he looked up and saw him beckoning as be- 
fore. Upon this he immediately arose, and with the 
light in his hand followed it. The ghost slowly stalked 
along, as if encumbered with his chains, and, turning 
into the area of the house, suddenly vanished. Athe- 
nodorus, being thus deserted, made a mark with some 
grass and leaves where the spirit left him. The next 
day he gave information of this to the magistrates, and 
advised them to order that spot to be dug up. This 
was accordingly done, and the skeleton of a man in 
chains was there found ; for the body, having lain a con- 
siderable time in the ground, was putrefied and mould- 
ered away from the fetters. The bones, being collected 
together, were publicly buried, and thus, after the ghost 
was appeased by the proper ceremonies, the house was 
haunted no more." * This story has such a modern air 
as to be absolutely disheartening. Are ghosts, then, as 
incapable of invention as dramatic authors 1 But the 
demeanor of Athenodorus has the gi'and air of the clas- 
sical period, of one qui connait son monde, and feels the 
superiority of a living philosopher to a dead Philistine. 
How far above all modern armament is his prophylactic 
against his insubstantial fellow-lodger ! Now-a-days 
men take pistols into haunted houses. Sterne, and 
after him Novalis, discovered that gunpowder made all 
men equally tall, but Athenodorus had found out that 
pen and ink establish a superiority in spiritual stature. 
As men of this world, we feel our dignity exalted by his 
keeping an ambassador from the other waiting till he 
had finished his paragraph. Never surely did author- 
ship appear to greater advantage. Athenodorus seems 
to have been of Hamlet's mind : 

* Pliny's Letters, VII. 27. Melmoth's translation. 



92 WITCHCRAFT. 

" I do not set my life at a pin's fee, 
And, for my soul, what can it do to that, 
Being a thing immortal, as itself ? " * 

A superstition, as its name imports, is something that 
has been left to stand over, like unfinished business, 
from one session of the world's ivitenagemot to the next. 
The vulgar receive it implicitly on the principle of omne 
ignotum pro possibili, a theory acted on by a much larger 
number than is commonly supposed, and even the en- 
lightened are too apt to consider it, if not proved, at least 
rendered probable by the hearsay evidence of popular 
experience. Particular superstitions are sometimes the 
embodiment by popular imagination of ideas that were at 
first mere poetic figments, but more commonly the degrad- 
ed and distorted relics of religious beliefs. Dethroned 
gods, outlawed by the new dynasty, haunted the borders 
of their old dominions, lurking in forests and mountains, 
and venturing to show themselves only after nightfall. 
Grimm and others have detected old divinities skulking 
about in strange disguises, and living from hand to mouth 
on the charity of Gammer Grethel and Mere I'Oie. Cast 
out from Olympus and Asgard, they were thankful for 
the hospitality of the chimney-corner, and kept soul and 
body together by an illicit traffic between this world and 
the other. While Schiller was lamenting the Gods of 
Greece, some of them were nearer neighbors to him than 

* Something like this is the speech of Don Juan, after the statue of 
Don Gonzales has gone out : 

" Pero todas son ideas 
Que da a la imaginacion 
El temor; y temer muertos 
Es muy villano temor. 
Que si vtn cuerpo noble, vivo, 
Con potencias y razon 
Y con alma no se tema, 
i Quien cuerpos muertos temio? " 

£1 Burlador de Sevilla, A. iii. s. 15. 



WITCHCRAFT. 93 

he dreamed ; and Heine had the wit to turn them to 
delightful account, showing himself, perhaps, the wiser 
of the two in saving what he could from the shipwreck 
of the past for present use on this prosaic Juan Fernan- 
dez of a scientific age, instead of sitting down to bewail 
it. To make the pagan divinities hateful, they were 
stigmatized as cacodaemons ; and as the human mind 
finds a pleasure in analogy and system, an infernal hie- 
rarchy gradually shaped itself as the convenient antip- 
odes and counterpoise of the celestial one. Perhaps at 
the bottom of it all there was a kind of unconscious 
manicheism, and Satan, as Prince of Darkness, or of the 
Powers of the Air, became at last a sovereign, with his 
great feudatories and countless vassals, capable of main- 
taining a not unequal contest with the King of Heaven. 
He was supposed to have a certain power of bestowing 
earthly prosperity, but he was really, after all, nothing- 
better than a James II. at St. Germains, who could 
make Dukes of Perth and confer titular fiefs and garters 
as much as he liked, without the unpleasant necessity 
of providing any substance behind the shadow. That 
there should have been so much loyalty to him, under 
these disheartening circumstances, seems to me, on the 
whole, creditable to poor human nature. In this case 
it is due, at least in j)art, to that instinct of the poor 
among the races of the North, where there was a long 
winter, and too often a scanty harvest, — and the poor 
have been always and everywhere a majority, — which 
made a deity of Wish. The Acheronta-moveho impulse 
must have been pardonably strong in old women starv- 
ing with cold and hunger, and fathers with large fami- 
lies and a small winter stock of provision. Especially 
in the transition period from the old religion to the new, 
the temptation must have been gi'eat to try one's luck 
with the discrowned dynasty, when the intruder was 



94 WITCHCRAFT. 

deaf and blind to claims that seemed just enough, so 
long as it was still believed that God personally inter- 
fered in the affairs of men. On his death-bed, says 
Piers Plowman, 

" The poore dare plede and prove by reson 
To have allowance of his lord ; by the law he it claimeth ; 

Thanne may beggaris as beestes after boote waiten 
That al hir lif lian lyved in langour and in defaute 
But God sente hem som tyme som manere joye, 
Outher here or ellis where, kynde wolde it nevere." 

He utters the common feeling when he says that it were 
against nature. But when a man has his choice be- 
tween here and elsewhere, it may be feared that the 
other world will seem too desperately far away to be 
waited for when hungry ruin has him in the wind, and 
the chance on earth is so temptingly near. Hence the 
notion of a transfer of allegiance from God to Satan, 
sometimes by a written compact, sometimes with the 
ceremony by which homage is done to a feudal superior. 
Most of the practices of witchcraft — such as the 
power to raise storms, to destroy cattle, to assume the 
shape of beasts by the use of certain ointments, to in- 
duce deadly maladies in men by waxen images, or love 
by means of charms and philtres — were inheritances 
from ancient paganism. But the theory of a compact 
was the product of later times, the result, no doubt, of 
the efforts of the clergy to inspire a horror of any lapse 
into heathenish rites by making devils of all the old 
gods. Christianity may be said to have invented the 
soul as an individual entity to be saved or lost ; and 
thus grosser wits were led to conceive of it as a piece of 
property that could be transferred by deed of gift or 
sale, duly signed, sealed, and witnessed. The earliest 
legend of the kind is that of Theophilus, chancellor of 
the church of Adana in Cilicia some time during the 



WITCHCRAFT. 95 

sixth century. It is said to have been first written by 
Eutychianiis, who had been a pupil of Theophilus, 
and who tells the story partly as an eyewitness, partly 
from the narration of his master. The nun Hroswitha 
first treated it dramatically in the latter half of the 
tenth century. Some four hundred years later Kute- 
beuf made it the theme of a French miracle-play. His 
treatment of it is not without a certain jDoetic merit. 
Theophilus has been deprived by his bishop of a lucra- 
tive office. In his despair he meets with Saladin, qui 
parloit au deahle quant il voloit. Saladin tempts him to 
deny God and devote himself to the Devil, who, in 
return, will give him back all his old prosperity and 
more. He at last consents, signs and seals the contract 
required, and is restored to his old place by the bishop. 
But now remorse and terror come upon him ; he calls 
on the Virgin, who, after some demur, compels Satan to 
bring back his deed from the infernal muniment-chest 
(which must have been fire-proof beyond any skill of 
our modern safe-makers), and the bishop having read it 
aloud to the awe-stricken congregation, Theoj)hilus be- 
comes his own man again. In this play, the theory of 
devilish compact is already complete in all its particu- 
lars. The paper must be signed with the blood of the 
grantor, who does feudal homage {or joing tes mains, et 
si devien mes horn), and engages to eschew good and do 
evil all the days of his life. The Devil, however, does 
not imijrint any stigma upon his new vassal, as in the 
later stories of witch-compacts. The following passage 
from the opening speech of Theophilus will illustrate 
the conception to which I have alluded of God as a 
liege lord against whom one might seek revenge on suf- 
ficient provocation, — and the only revenge possible was 
to rob him of a subject by going over to the gi^eat Suze- 
rain, his deadly foe : — 



96 WITCHCRAFT. 

" N'est riens que por avoir ne face; 
Ne pris riens Dieu et sa manace. 
Irai me je noier ou pendre? 
le ne m'en puis pas a Dieu prendre, 
Con ne puet a lui avenir. 

M6s il s'est en si haut lieu mis, 
Por eschiver ses anemis 
Con n'i puet trere ni lancier. 
Se or pooie a lui tancier, 
Et combattre et escrimir, 
La char li feroie fremir. 
Or est la sus en son solaz, 
Laz! chetis! et je sui es laz 
De Povrete et de Soufrete." * 

During the Middle Ages the story became a favorite 
topic with preachers, while carvings and painted win- 
dows tended still further to popularize it, and to render 
men's minds familiar with the idea which makes the nexus 
of its plot. The plastic hands of Calderon shaped it into 
a dramatic poem not surpassed, perhaps hardly equalled, 
in subtile imaginative quality by any other of modern 
times. 

In proportion as a belief in the possibility of this 
damnable merchandising with hell became general, accu- 
sations of it grew more numerous. Among others, the 
memory of Poj^e Sylvester II. was blackened with the 
charge of having thus bargained away his soul. All 
learning fell under suspicion, till at length the very 
grammar itself (the last volume in the world, one would 
say, to conjure with) gave to English the word gramary 
(enchantment), and in French became a book of magic, 
under the alias of Grimoire. It is not at all unlikely 
that, in an age when the boundary between actual and 
possible was not very well defined, there were scholars 
who made experiments in this direction, and signed con- 

* Th(^'atre Fran9ais au Moyen Age (Monmerqu^ et Michel), pp. 139, 
140. 



WITCHCRAFT. 97 

tracts, though they never had a chance to com^Dlete their 
bargain by an actual cleHvery. I do not recall any case 
of witchcraft in which such a document was produced in 
court as evidence against the accused. Such a one, it is 
true, was ascribed to Grandier, but was not brought for- 
ward at his trial. It should seem that Grandier had been 
shrewd enough to take a bond to secure the fulfilment 
of the contract on the other side ; for w^e have the docu- 
ment in fic-simile, signed and sealed by Lucifer, Beelze- 
bub, Satan, Elimi, Leviathan, and Astaroth, duly wit- 
nessed by Baalberith, Secretary of the Grand Council of 
Demons. Fancy the competition such a state paper as 
this w^ould arouse at a sale of autographs ! Commonly 
no security appears to have been given by the other 
party to these arrangements but the bare word of the 
Devil, which was considered, no doubt, every w^hit as 
good as his bond. In most cases, indeed, he w\as the 
loser, and showed a want of capacity for affairs equal to 
that of an average giant of romance. Never w^as com- 
edy acted over and over with such sameness of repetition 
as " The Devil is an Ass." How often must he have 
exclaimed (laughing in his sleeve) : — 

" / to sucli blockheads set my "wit, 
/ damn such fools ! — go, go, you 're bit ! " 

In popular legend he is made the victim of some equivo- 
cation so gross that any court of equity would have 
ruled in his favor. On the other hand, if the story had 
been dressed up by some medigeval Tract Society, the 
Virgin appears in person at the right moment ex machina, 
and compels him to give up the property he had hon- 
estly paid for. One is tempted to ask. Were there no 
attorneys, then, in the place he came from, of whom he 
might have taken advice beforehand 1 On the wdiolc, he 
had rather hard measure, and it is a w^onder he did not 

5 G 



98 WITCHCRAFT. 

throw up the business in disgust. Sometimes, however, 
he was more lucky, as with the unhappy Dr. Faust ; and 
even so lately as 1695, he came in the shape of a "tall 
fellow with black beard and periwig, respectable looking 
and well dressed," about two o'clock in the afternoon, 
to fly away with the Marechal de Luxembourg, which, 
on the stroke of five, he punctually did as per contract, 
taking with him the window and its stone framing into 
the bargain. The clothes and wig of the involuntary 
aeronaut were, in the handsomest manner, left upon the 
bed, as not included in the bill of sale. In this case 
also we have a copy of the articles of agreement, 
twenty-eight in number, by the last of which the Mare- 
chal renounces God and devotes himself to the enemy. 
This clause, sometimes the only one, always the most 
important in such comj)acts, seems to show that they 
first took shape in the imagination, while the struggle 
between Paganism and Christianity was still going on. 
As the converted heathen was made to renounce his 
false gods, none the less real for being false, so the rene- 
gade Christian must forswear the true Deity. It is 
very likely, however, that the whole thing may be more 
modern than the assumed date of Theophilus would im- 
ply, and if so, the idea of feudal allegiance gave the 
first hint, as it certainly modified the particulars, of the 
ceremonial. 

This notion of a personal and private treaty with the 
Evil One has something of dignity about it that has 
made it perennially attractive to the most imaginative 
minds. It rather flatters than mocks our feeling of the 
dignity of man. As we come down to the vulgar par- 
ody of it hi the confessions of wretched old women on 
the rack, our pity and indignation are mingled with dis- 
gust. One of the most particular of these confessions 
is that of Abel de la Rue, convicted in 1584. The 



WITCHCRAFT. 99 

accused was a novice in the Franciscan Convent at 
Meaux. Having been punished by the master of the 
novices for steaHng some apples and nuts in the convent 
garden, the Devil appeared to him in the shape of a 
black dog, promising him his protection, and advising 
him to leave the convent. Not long after going into the 
sacristy, he saw a large volume fastened by a chain, and 
further secured by bars of iron. The name of this 
book was Grimoire. Thrusting his hands through the 
bars, he contrived to open it, and having read a sentence 
(which Bodin carefully suppresses), there suddenly ap- 
peared to him a man of middle stature, with a pale and 
very frightful countenance, clad in a long black robe of 
the Italian fashion, and with faces of men like his own 
on his breast and knees. As for his feet they were like 
those of cows. He could not have been the most agree- 
able of companions, ayant le corps et haleine puante. 
This man told him not to be afraid, to take off his 
habit, to put faith in him, and he would give him what- 
ever he asked. Then laying hold of him below the 
arms, the imknown transported him under the gallows 
of Meaux, and then said to him with a trembling and 
broken voice, and having a visage as pale as that of a 
man who has been hanged, and a very stinking breath, 
that he should fear nothing, but have entire confidence 
in him, that he should never want for anything, that his 
own name was Maitre Rigoux, and that he would like to 
be his master ; to which De la Rue made answer that he 
would do whatever he commanded, and that he wished 
to be gone from the Franciscans. Thereupon Rigoux 
disappeared, but returning between seven and eight in 
the evening, took him round the waist and carried him 
back to the sacristy, promising to come again for him 
the next day. This he accordingly did, and told De la 
Rue to take off his habit, get him gone from the con- 



100 WITCHCRAFT. 

vent, and meet him near a great tree on the high-road 
from Meaux to Yaulx-Courtois. Eigoux met him there 
and took him to a certain Maitro Pien*e, "who, after 
a few words exchanged in an undertone with Rigoux, 
sent De la Rue to the stable, after his return whence 
he saw no more of Rigoux. Thereupon Pierre and 
his wife made him good cheer, telling him that for 
the love of Maitre Rigoux they would treat him 
well, and that he must obey the said Rigonx, which 
he promised to do. About two months after, Maitre 
Pierre, who commonly took him to the fields to watch 
cattle, said to him there that they must go to the As- 
sembly, because he (Pien-e) was out of powders, to 
which he made answer that he was willing. Three days 
later, about Christmas eve, 1575, Pierre having sent his 
wife to sleep out of the house, set a long branch of 
broom in the chimney-corner, and bade De la Rue go 
to bed, but not to sleep. About eleven they heard a 
great noise as of an impetuous wind and thunder in the 
chimney : which hearing, Maitre Pierre told him to 
dress himself, for it was time to be gone. Then Pierre 
took some grease from a little box and anointed himself 
under the ami-pits, and De la Rue on the palms of his 
hands, which incontinently felt as if on fire, and the 
said grease stank like a cat three weeks or a month 
dead. Then, Pierre and he bestriding the branch, 
Maitre Rigoux took it by the butt and drew it up chim- 
ney as if the wind had lifted them. And, the night 
being dark, he saw suddenly a torch before them light- 
ing them, and Maitre Rigoux- was gone unless he had 
changed himself into the said torch. Arrived at a 
gi'assy place some five leagues from Yaulx-Courtois, they 
found a company of some sixty people of all ages, none 
of whom he knew, except a certain PieiTC of Damp- 
martin and an old woman who was executed, as he had 



WITCHCRAFT. 101 

heard, about five years ago for sorcery at Lagny. Then 
suddenly he noticed that all (except Rigoux, who was 
clad as before) were dressed in linen, though they had 
not changed their clothes. Then, at command of the 
eldest among them, who seemed about eighty years old, 
with a white beard and almost wholly bald, each swept 
the place in front of himself with his broom. There- 
upon Rigoux changed into a great he-goat, black and 
stinking, around whom they all danced backward with 
their faces outward and their backs towards the goat. 
They danced about half an hour, and then his master 
told him they must adore the goat who was the Devil 
€t ce fait et cUct^ veit que ledict Bouc courha ses deux xyieds 
de deuant et leua son cul en liaut, et lors que certaines 
menues graines grosses comme testes d'espingles, qui se con- 
xiertissoient en poudres fort puantes, sentant le soiilphre et 
2')0udre a canon et chair puant meslees ensemhle seroient 
tomhees sur plusieurs drap>p>eaux en sep>t doubles. Then 
the oldest, and so the rest in order, went forward on 
their knees and gathered up their cloths with the pow- 
ders, but first each se seroit incline vers le Diahle et iceluy 
haise en la, i^artie honteuse de son corps. They went home 
on their broom, lighted as before. De la Rue confessed 
also that he was at another assembly on the eve of St. 
John Baptist. With the powders they could cause the 
death of men against whom they had a spite, or their 
cattle. Rigoux before long began to tempt him to drown 
himself, and, though he lay down, yet rolled him some 
distance towards the river. It is plain that the poor 
fellow was mad or half-witted or both. And yet Bo- 
din, the author of the De Bepichlica, reckoned one of the 
ablest books of that age, believed all this filthy nonsense, 
and prefixes it to his Demonomanie, as proof conclusive 
of the existence of sorcerers. 

This was in 1587. Just a century later, Glanvil, one 



102 WITCHCRAFT. 

of the most eminent men of his day, and Henry More, 
the Platonist, whose memory is still dear to the lovers 
of an imaginative mj^sticism, were perfectly satisfied with 
evidence like that which follows. Elizabeth Styles con- 
fessed, in 16G4, "that the Devil about ten years since 
appeared to her in the shape of a handsome Man, and 
after of a black Dog. That he promised her Money, 
and that she should live gallantly, and have the pleasure 
of the World for twelve years, if she would with her 
Blood sign his Paper, which was to give her soul to him 
and observe his Laws and that he might suck her Blood. 
This after Four Solicitations, the Examinant promised 
him to do. Upon which he pricked the fourth Finger 
of her right hand, between the middle and upper Joynt 
(where the Sign at the Examination remained) and with 
a Drop or two of her Blood, she signed the Paper with 
an 0. Upon this the Devil gave her sixpence and van- 
ished with the Paper. That since he hath appeared to 
her in the Shape of a Man, and did so on Wednesday 
seven-night past, but more usually he appears in the 
Likeness of a Dog, and Cat, and a Fly like a Millar, 
in which last he usually sucks in the Poll about four of 
the Clock in the Morning, and did so Jan. 27, and 
that it is pain to her to be so suckt. That when she 
hath a desire to do harm she calls the Spirit by the name 
of Robin, to whom, when he appeareth, she useth these 
words, Sathan, give me my pur2:)ose. She then tells 
him what she would have done. And that he should so 
appear to her was part of her Contract with him." The 
Devil in this case appeared as a black (dark-com- 
plexioned) man " in black clothes, with a little band," — 
a very clerical -looking personage. " Before they are 
carried to their meetings they anoint their Foreheads 
and Hand- Wrists with an Oyl the Spirit brings them 
(which smells raw) and then they are carried in a very 



WITCHCRAFT. 103 

short time, using these words as they pass, Tliout, tout a 
tout, tliroiigliout and about. And when they go off from 
their Meetings they say, Eentum, Tormentum. That at 
every meeting before the Spirit vanisheth away, he ap- 
points the next meeting place and time, and at his 
departure there is a foul smell. At their meeting they 
have usually Wine or good Beer, Cakes, Meat or the like. 
They eat and drink really when they meet, in their Bod- 
ies, dance also and have some Musick. The Man in 
black sits at the higher end, and Anne Bishop usually 
next him. He useth some words before meat, and none 
after ; his Voice is audible but very low. The Man in 
black sometimes plays on a Pipe or Cittern, and the 
Company dance. At last the Devil vanisheth, and all 
are carried to their several homes in a short space. At 
their parting they say, A Boy ! merry meet, merry part ! " 
Alice Duke confessed " that Anne Bishop persuaded her 
to go with her into the Churchyard in the Night-time, and 
being come thither, to go backward round the Church, 
which they did three times. In their first round they 
met a Man in black Cloths who went round the second 
time with them ; and then they met a thing in the 
Shape of a great black Toad which leapt up against 
the Examinant's Apron. In their third round they met 
somewhat in the shape of a Rat, which vanished away." 
She also received sixpence from the Devil, and " her Fa- 
miliar did commonly suck her right Breast about seven 
at night in the shape of a little Cat of a dunnish Colour, 
which is as smooth as a Want [mole], and when she 
is suckt, she is in a kind of Trance." Poor Christian 
Green got only fourpence half-penny for her soul, but 
her bargain was made some years later than that of the 
others, and quotations, as the stock-brokers would say, 
ranged lower. Her familiar took the shape of a hedge- 
hog. Julian Cox confessed that " she had been often 



104 WITCHCRAFT. 

tempted by the Devil to be a Witch, but never consented. 
That one Evening she walkt about a ]\lile from her own 
House and there came riding towards her three Persons 
upon three Broomstaves, born up about a yard and a 
half from the ground. Two of them she formerly knew, 
which was a "Witch and a Wizzard that w^ere hanged for 
Witchcraft several years before. The third person she 
knew not. He came in the shape of a black Man, and 
tempted her to give him her Soul, or to that effect, and 
to express it by pricking her Finger and giving her name 
in her Blood in token of it." On her trial Judge Archer 
told the jury, " he had heard that a Witch could not re- 
peat that Petition in the Lord's Prayer, viz. And lead us 
not into temptation, and having this occasion, he w^ould 
try the Experiment." The jury " were not in the least 
measure to guide their Verdict according to it, because 
it was not legal Evidence." Accordingly it was found 
that the poor old trot could say only. Lead us into temp- 
tation., or Lead us not into no temptation. Probably she 
used the latter form first, and, finding she had blun- 
dered, corrected herself by leaving out both the negatives. 
The old English double negation seems never to have 
been heard of by the court. Janet Douglass, a pretended 
dumb girl, by whose contrivance five persons had been 
burned at Paisley, in 1677, for having caused the sick- 
ness of Sir George Maxwell by means of waxen and 
other images, having recovered her speech shortly after, 
declared that she " had some smattering knowdedge of 
the Lord's prayer, which she had heard the witches re- 
peat, it seems, by her vision, in the presence of the 
Devil ; and at his desire, which they observed, they 
added to the word art the letter u\ w^hich made it run, 
' Our Father which wart in heaven,' by which means the 
Devil made the application of the prayer to himself." 
She also showed on the arm of a woman named Camp- 



WITCHCRAFT. 105 

bell " an invisible mark which she had gotten from the 
Devil." The wife of one Barton confessed that she had 
ensao-ed " in the Devil's service. She renounced her 
baptism, and did prostrate her body to the foul spirit, 
and received his mark, and got a new name from him, 
and was called Margaratus. She was asked if she ever 
had any pleasure in his company % ' Never much,' says 
she, ' but one night going to a dancing upon Pentland 
Hills, in the likeness of a rough tanny [tawny] dog, 
playing on a pair of pipes ; the spring he played,' says 
she, ' was The dlly hit chiclceii, gar cast it a lyickle., and it 
will grow meikle, ''"''' ^ In 1670, near seventy of both 
sexes, among them fifteen children, were executed for 
witchcraft at the village of Mohra in Sweden. Thirty- 
six children, between the ages of nine and sixteen, were 
sentenced to be scourged with rods on the palms of their 
hands, once a week for a year. The evidence in this 
case against the accused seems to have been mostly that 
of children. " Being asked whether they were sure that 
they were at any time carried away by the Devil, they 
all declared they were, begging of the Commissioners 
that they might be freed from that intolerable slavery." 
They " used to go to a Gravel pit which lay hardby a 
Cross-way and there they put on a vest over their heads, 
and then danced round, and after ran to the Cross-way and 
called the Devil thrice, first with a still Voice, the sec- 
ond time somewhat louder, and the third time very 
loud, with these words, Antecessow\ come and carry us to 
BlocTcula. Whereupon immediately he used to appear, 
but in different Habits ; but for the most part they saw 
him in a gi'ay Coat and red and blue Stockings. He had 
a red Beard, a highcrowned Hat, with linnen of divers 

* " There sat Aiild Nick in shape o' beast, 
A towzy tyke, black, gi*im, an' large, 
To gie them music was his charge." 
5* 



106 WITCHCRAFT. 

Colours wrapt about it, and long Garters upon his Stock- 
ings." " They must procure some Scrapings of Altars 
and Filings of Church-Clocks [bells], and he gives them 
a Horn with some Salve in it wherewith they do anoint 
themselves." " Being asked whether they were sure of 
a real personal Transportation, and whether they were 
awake when it was done, they all answered in the Af- 
firmative, and that the Devil sometimes laid something 
down in the Place that was very like them. But one of 
them confessed that he did only take away her Strength, 
and her Body lay still upon the Ground. Yet some- 
times he took even her Body with him." " Till of late 
they never had that power to carry away Children, but 
only this year and the last, and the Devil did at this 
time force them to it. That heretofore it was sufficient 
to carry but one of their Children or a Stranger's Child, 
which yet happened seldom, but now he did plague them 
and whip them if they did not procure him Children, in- 
somuch that they had no peace or quiet for him ; and 
whereas formerly one Journey a Week would serve their 
turn from their own town to the place aforesaid, now 
they were forced to run to other Towns and Places for 
Children, and that they brought with them some fifteen, 
some sixteen Children every night. For their journey 
they made use of all sorts of Instruments, of Beasts, 
of Men, of Spits, and Posts, according as they had op- 
portunity. If they do ride upon Goats and have many 
Children with them," they have a way of lengthening 
the goat with a spit, " and then are anointed with the 
aforesaid Ointment. A little Girl of Elfdale confessed. 
That, naming the name of Jesus, as she was carried 
away, she fell suddenly upon the Ground and got a great 
hole in her Side, which the Devil presently healed up 
again. The first thing they must do at Blockula was 
that they must deny aU and devote themselves Body and 



WITCHCRAFT. 1*07 

Soul to the Devil, and promise to serve him faithfully, 
and confirm all this with an Oath. Hereupon they cut 
their Fingers, and with their Bloud writ their Name in 
his Book. He caused them to be baptized by such 
Priests as he had there and made them confirm their 
Baptism with dreadful Oaths and Imprecations. Here- 
upon the Devil gave them a Purse, wherein their filings 
of Clocks [bells], with a Stone tied to it, which they 
threw into the Water, and then they were forced to speak 
these words : As these filings of the Clock do never return 
to the Clock from which they are taken, so may my soul 
never return to Heaven. The diet they did use to have 
there was Broth with Colworts and Bacon in it, Oatmeal- 
Bread spread with Butter, Milk, and Cheese. Sometimes 
it tasted very well, sometimes very ill. After Meals, 
they went to Dancing, and in the mean while Swore and 
Cursed most dreadfully, and afterward went to fighting 
one with another. The Devil had Sons and Daughters 
by them, which he did marry together, and they did 
couple and brought forth Toads and Serpents. If he 
hath a mind to be merry with them, he lets them all ride 
upon Spits before him, takes afterwards the Spits and 
beats them black and blue, and then laughs at them. 
They had seen sometimes a very great Devil like a 
Dragon, with fire about him and bound with an Iron 
Chain, and the Devil that converses with them tells them 
that, if they confess anything, he will let that great 
Devil loose upon them, whereby all Siveedland shall come 
into great danger. The Devil taught them to milk, 
which was in this wise : they used to stick a knife in the 
Wall and hang a kind of Label on it, which they drew 
and stroaked, and as long as this lasted the Persons that 
they had Power over were miserably plagued, and the 
Beasts were milked that way till sometimes they died of 
it. The minister of Elfdale declared that one Night 



108 WITCHCRAFT. 

these Witches were to his thinking upon the crown of 
his Head and that from thence he had had a long-con- 
tinued Pain of the Head. One of the Witches con- 
fessed, too, that the Devil had sent her to torment the 
Minister, and that she was ordered to use a Nail and 
strike it into his Head, but it would not enter very deep. 
They confessed also that the Devil gives them a Beast 
about the bigness and shape of a young Cat, which they 
call a Carrier^ and that he gives them a Bird too as big 
as a Raven, but white. And these two Creatures they 
can send anywhere, and wherever they come they take 
away all sorts of Victuals they can get. What the Bird 
brings they may keep for themselves ; but what the 
Carrier brings they must reserve for the Devil. The 
Lords Commissioners were indeed very earnest and took 
great Pains to persuade them to show some of their 
Tricks, but to no Purpose ; for they did all unanimously 
confess, that, since they had confessed all, they found 
that all their Witchcraft was gone, and that the Devil 
at this time appeared to them very terrible with Claws 
on his Hands and Feet, and with Horns on his Head and 
a long Tail behind." At Blockula " the Devil had a 
Church, such another as in the town of Mohra. When 
the Commissioners were coming, he told the Witches 
they should not fear them, for he would certainly kill 
them all. And they confessed that some of them had 
attempted to murther the Commissioners, but had not 
heen able to effect it." 

In these confessions we find included nearly all the 
particulars of the popular belief concerning witchcraft, 
and see the gradual degradation of the once superb Lu- 
cifer to the vulgar scarecrow with horns and tail. ** The 
Prince of Darkness ims a gentleman." From him who 
had not lost all his original brightness, to this dirty fel- 
low who leaves a stench, sometimes of brimstone, behind 



WITCHCRAFT. 109 

him, the descent is a long one. For the dispersion of 
this foul odor Dr. Henry More gives an odd reason. 
" The Devil also, as in other stories, leaving an ill smell 
behind him, seems to imply the reality of the business, 
those adscititious particles he held together in his visible 
vehicle being loosened at his vanishing and so offending 
the nostrils by their floating and diffusing themselves in 
the open Air." In all the stories vestiges of Paganism 
are not indistinct. The three principal witch gatherings 
of the year were held on the days of great j)agan festi- 
vals, which were afterwards adopted by the Church. 
Maury supposes the Avitches' Sabbath to be derived from 
the rites of Bacchus Sabazius, and accounts in this way 
for the Devil's taking the shape of a he-goat. But the 
name was more likely to be given from hatred of the 
Jews, and the goat may have a much less remote origin. 
Bodin assumes the identity of the Devil with Pan, and 
in the popidar mythology both of Kelts and Teutons 
there were certain hairy wood-demons called by the 
former Dus and by the latter Scixit. Our common names 
of Dense and Old Scratch are plainly derived from these, 
and possibly Old Harry is a corruption of Old Hairy. 
By Latinization they became Satyrs. Here, at any rate, 
is the source of the cloven hoof. The belief in the 
Devil's appearing to his worshippers as a goat is very old. 
Possibly the fact that this animal was sacred to Thor, 
the god of thunder, may explain it. Certain it is that 
the traditions of Vulcan, Thor, and Wayland * converged 
at last in Satan. Like Vulcan, he was hurled from heav- 
en, and like him he still limps across the stage in Mephis- 
topheles, though without knowing why. In Germany, 
he has a horse's and not a cloven foot,t because the 

* Hence, perhaps, the name Valant applied to the Devil, about the 
origin of which Grimm is in doubt, 
t One foot of the Greek Empusa was an ass's hoof. 



110 WITCHCRAFT. 

horse was a frequent pagan sacrifice, and therefore asso- 
ciated with devil-worship under the new dispensation. 
Hence the horror of hippophagism which some French 
gastronomes are striving to overcome. Everybody who 
has read " Tom Brown," or Wordsworth's Sonnet on a 
German stove, remembers the Saxon horse sacred to 
Woden. The raven was also his peculiar bird, and 
Grimm is inclined to think this the reason why the 
witch's familiar appears so often in that shape. It is 
true that our Old Nick is derived from NiJckar, one of 
the titles of that divinity, but the association of the 
Evil One with the raven is older, and most probably ow- 
ing to the ill-omened character of the bird itself Al- 
ready in the apocryphal gospel of the " Infancy," the 
demoniac Son of the Chief Priest puts on his head one 
of the swaddling-clothes of Christ which Mary has hung 
out to dry, and forthwith " the devils began to come out 
of his mouth and to fly away as croivs and serpents." 

It will be noticed that the witches underwent a form 
of baptism. As the system gradually perfected itself 
among the least imaginative of men, as the superstitious 
are apt to be, they could do nothing better than de- 
scribe Satan's world as in all respects the reverse of that 
which had been conceived by the orthodox intellect 
as Divine. Have you an illustrated Bible of the last 
century *? Very good. Tm^n it upside down, and you 
find the prints on the whole about as near nature as ever, 
and yet pretending to be something new by a simple de- 
vice that saves the fancy a good deal of trouble. For, 
while it is true that the poetic fancy plays, yet the fac- 
ulty which goes by that pseudonyme in prosaic minds 
(and it was by such that the details of this Satanic com- 
merce were pieced together) is hard put to it for inven- 
tion, and only too thankful for any labor-saving contri- 
vance whatsoever. Accordingly, aU it need take the 



WITCHCEAFT. Ill 

trouble to do was to reverse the ideas of sacred thino-s 
already engraved on its surface, and behold, a kingdom 
of hell with all the merit and none of the difficulty of 
originality ! " Uti olim Deus populo suo Hierosolymis 
Synagogas erexit ut in iis ignarus legis divinee populus 
erudiretur, voluntatemque Dei placitam ex verbo in iis 
preedicato hauriret ; ita et Diabolus in omnibus omnino 
suis actionibus simiam Dei agens, gregi suo acherontico 
conventus et synagogas, quas satanica sabbata vocant, 

indicit Atque de hisce Conventibus et Synagogis 

Lamiarum nullus Antorum quos quidem evolvi, imo nee 
ipse Lamiarum Patronus [here he glances at Wierus] 
scilicet ne dubiolum quidem movit. Adeo ut tuto affir- 
mari liceat conventus a diabolo certo institui. Quos vel 
ipse, tanquam prseses collegii, vel per dsemonem, qui ad 
cujuslibet sagse custodiam constitutus est, .... vel per 
alios Magos aut sagas per unum aut duos dies ante- 

quam fiat congregatio denunciat Loci in quibus 

Solent a dsemone coetus et conventicula malefica institui 
plerumque sunt sylvestres, occulti, subterranei, et ab 
hominiim conversatione remoti Evocatee hoc mo- 
do et tempore Lamise, .... daemon illis persuadet eas 
non posse conventiculis interesse nisi nudum corpus 
unguento ex corpusculis infantum ante baptismum neca- 
torum prseparato illinant, idque propterea solum illis 
persuadet ut ad quam plurimas infantum insontium csedes 

eas alliciat Unctionis ritu peracto, abiturientes, 

ne forte a maritis in lectis desiderantur, vel per incanta- 
tionem somnum, aurem nimirum vellicando dextra manu 
prius preedicto unguine illita, conciliant maritis ex quo 
non facile possunt excitari ; vel daemones personas quas- 
dam dormientibus adumbrant, quas, si contigeret exper- 
gisci, suas uxores esse putarent ; vel interea alius daemon 
in forma succubi ad latus maritorum adjungitur qui loco 
uxoris est Et ita sine omni remora insidentes 



112 WITCHCRAFT. 

baciilo, fiircse, scopis, aut arundini vel tauro, eqno, sul, 
hirco, aut cani, quorum omnium exemx^la prodidit Remig. 

L. I. c. 14, devehuntur a dsemone ad loca destinata 

Ibi dsemon praeses conventus in solio sedet magnifico, 
forma terrifica, ut plurimum hirci vel canis. Ad queiii 
advenientes viri juxta ac mulieres accedunt reveren- 
tise exhibendse et adorandi gratia, non tamen iino 
eodemque modo. Interdum complicatis genubus sup- 
plices j interdum obverso incedentes tergo et modo re- 
trogrado, in oppositum directo illi reverentite quam nos 
prsestare solemus. In signum homagii (sit honor castis 
auribus) Principem suum hircum in [obscsenissimo quo- 
dam corporis loco] summa cum reverentia sacrilego ore 
osculantur. Quo facto, sacrificia d£emoni faciunt multis 
modis. Ssepe liberos suos ipsi offerunt. Saepe com- 
munione sumpta benedictam hostiam in ore asservatam 
et extractam (horreo dicere) dsemoni oblatam coram eo 
pede conculcant. His et similibus flagitiis et abomina- 
tionibus execrandis commissis, incipiunt mensis assidere 
et convivari de cibis insipidis, insulsis,* furtivis, quos 
dsemon suppeditat, vel quos singulse attulere, inderdum 

tripudiant ante convivium, interdum post illud 

Nee men see sua deest benedictio costu hoc digna, verbis 
constans plane blasphemis quibus ipsum Beelzebub et 
creatorem et datorem et conservatorem omnium profi- 
tentur. Eadem sententia est gratiarum actionis. Post 
convivium, dorsis invicem obversis .... choreas ducere 
et cantare fescenninos in honorem deemonis obscsenissi- 
mos, vel ad tympanum fistulamve sedentis alicujus in 
bifida arbore saltare .... tum suis amasiis daimonibus 
foedissime commisceri. Ultimo pidveribus (quos aliqui 
scribunt esse cineres hirci illis quern dcemon assumpserat 
et quem adorant subito coram illius flamma absumpti) vel 
venenis aliis acceptis, ssepe etiam cuique indicto nocendi 

* Salt was forbidden at these witch-feasts. 



WITCHCRAFT. 113 

pen SO, et pronuneiato Pseudothei dsemonis decreto, 
Ulciscamini vos, alioqui moriemini. Duabus au\: tribus 
horis in hisce liidis exactis circa Gallicinium daemon con- 
vivas suas dimittit." * Sometimes they were baptized 
anew. Sometimes they renounced the Virgin, wliom 
they called in their rites extensam mulierem. If the 
Ave Mary bell should ring while the demon is con- 
veying home his witch, he lets her drop. In the confes- 
sion of Agnes Simpson the meeting place was North 
Berwick Kirk. " The Devil started up himself in the 
pulpit, like a meikle blaclsi man, and calling the row 
[roll] every one answered. Here. At his command they 
opened up three graves and cutted off from the dead 
corjDses the joints of their fingers, toes, and nose, and 
parted them amongst them, and the said Agnes Simpson 
got for her part a winding-sheet and two joints. The 
Devil commanded them to keep the joints upon them 
while [till] they were dry, and then to make a powder 
of them to do evil withal." This confession is sadly 
memorable, for it was made before James I., then king 
of Scots, and is said to have convinced him of the reality 
of witchcraft. Hence the act passed in the first year of 
his reign in England, and not repealed till 1736, under 
which, perhaps in consequence of which, so many suf- 
fered. 

The notion of these witch-gatherings was first sug- 
gested, there can be little doubt, by secret conventicles 
of persisting or relapsed pagans, or of heretics. Both, 
perhaps, contributed their share. Sometimes a moun- 
tain, as in Germany the Blocksberg,t sometimes a con- 

* De Lamiis, p. 59 et seq. 

t If the Blokula of the Swedish "vvitches be a reminiscence of this, 
it would seem to point back to remote times and heathen ceremonies. 
Biat it is so impossible to distinguish what Avas pnt into the mind of 
tliose who confessed by tlieir examining torturers from what may have 
been there before, the result of a common superstition, that perhaps, 

H 



114: WITCHCEAFT. 

spicuoiis oak or linden, and there were many such among 
both Gauls and Germans sacred of old to pagan rites, 
and later a lonely heath, a place where two roads crossed 
each other, a cavern, gravel-pit, or quarry, the gallows, 
or the churchyard, was the place appointed for their dia- 
bolic orgies. That the witch could be conveyed bodily 
to these meetings was at first admitted without any 
question. But as the husbands of accused persons some- 
times testified that their wives had not left their beds on 
the alleged night of meeting, the witchmongers were 
put to strange shifts by way of accounting for it. Some- 
times the Devil imposed on the husband by a deceptio 
visus ; sometimes a demon took the place of the wife ; 
sometimes the body was left and the spirit only trans- 
ported. But the more orthodox opinion was in favor of 
corporeal deportation. Bodin appeals triumphantly to 
the cases of Habbakuk (now in the Apocrypha, but once 
making a part of the Book of Daniel), and of Philip in 
the Acts of the Apostles. " I find," he says, " this 
ecstatic ravishment they talk of much more wonderful 
than bodily transport. And if the Devil has this power, 
as they confess, of ravishing the spirit out of the body, 
is it not more easy to carry body and soul without sepa- 
ration or division of the reasonable part, than to with- 
draw and divide the one from the other without death]" 
The author of De Lamiis argues for the corporeal theory. 
" The evil Angels have the same superiority of natural 
power as the good, since by the Fall they lost none of 
the gifts of nature, but only those of grace." Now, as 
we know that good angels can thus transport men in the 
twinkling of an eye, it follows that evil ones may do the 
same. He fortifies his position by a recent example from 
secular history. " No one doubts about John Faust, who 

after all, the meeting on mountains may have been suggested by what 
Pliny says of the dances of Satyrs on Mount Atlas. 



I 



WITCHCRAFT. 115 

dwelt at "Wittenberg, in the time of the sainted Luther, 
and who, seating himself on his cloak with his compan- 
ions, was conveyed away and borne by the Devil through 
the air to distant kingdoms." * Glanvin inclines rather 
to the spiritual than the material hypothesis, and sug- 
gests " that the Witch's anointing herself before she 
takes her flight may perhaps serve to keep the body ten- 
antable and in fit disposition to receive the spirit at its 
return." Aubrey, whose " Miscellanies " were published 
in 1696, had no doubts whatever as to the physical 
asportation of the witch. He says that a gentleman 
of his acquaintance "was in Portugal anno 1655, when 
one was burnt by the inquisition for being brought 
thither from Goa, in East India, in the air, in an incredi- 
ble short time." As to the conveyance of witches 
through crevices, keyholes, chimneys, and the like, Herr 
Walburger discusses the question with such comical 
gravity that we must give his argument in the undimin- 
ished splendor of its jurisconsult latinity. The first 
sentence is worthy of Magister Bartholoma3us Kuckuk. 
" Hsec realis delatio trahit me quoque ad illam vulgo 
agitatam qusestionem : An diaholus Lamias corpore per 
angusta foramina parietum, fenesti^aruw., portarum aut 
per cavernas ignifluas ferre queant ? " (Surely if tace be 
good Latin for a candle, caverna ignifiua should be flatter- 
ing to a chimney.) " Resp. Lamise prsedicto modo srepius 
fatentur sese a diabolo per caminum aut alia loca angus- 
tiora scopis insidentes per eerem ad montem Bructerorum 
deferri. Verum deluduntur a Satana isttec mulieres hoc 
casu egregie nee revera rimulas istas penetrant, sed 
solummodo daemon prsecedens latenter aperit et claudit 
januas vel fenestras corporis earum capaces, per quas eaa 

* Wierus, whose book was published not long after Faust's death, 
apparently doubted the whole story, for he alludes to it with an iit 
fertur^ and plainly looked ou him as a mountebank. 



116 WITCHCRAFT. 

intromittit qiire putant se formam animalculi parvi, mus- 
telse, catti, locustee, et aliorum induisse. At si forte 
contingat ut per parietem se delatani confiteatur Saga, 
tunc, si non totum hoc prsestigiosum est, dsemonem 
tamen maxima celeritate tot quot sufficiiint lapides exi- 
mere et siistinere aliosne ruant, et postea eadem celeritate 
iteriim eos in suum locum reponere, existimo : cum 
hominum adspectus hanc tartarei latomi fraudem nequeat 
deprendere, Idem quoque judicium esse potest de trans- 
latione per caminum. Siquidcm si caverna iguiflua justse 
amplitudinig est ut nullo impedimento et hresitatione 
corpus humanum earn perrepere j)ossit, diabolo impossi- 
bile non esse per eam eas educere. Si vero per inj)ropor- 
tionatum (ut ita loquar) corporibus spatium eas educit 
tunc meras illusiones prsestigiosas esse censeo, nee a dia- 
bolo hoc unquam effici posse. Ratio est, quoniam diabo- 
lus essentiara creaturae seu lamiee immutare non pote!i|, 
multo minus efficere ut majus corpus penetret per spa- 
tium inproportionatum, alioquin cori^orum j)enetratio 
esset admittenda quod contra naturam et omne Physi- 
corum principium est." This is fine reasoning, and the 
ut ita loquar thrown in so carelessly, as if with a depre- 
catory w^ave of the hand for using a less classical locution 
than usual, strikes me as a very delicate touch indeed. 

Grimm tells us that he does not know when broom- 
sticks, spits, and similar utensils were first assumed to 
^be the canonical instruments of this nocturnal equita- 
tion. He thinks it comparatively modern, but I sus- 
pect it is as old as the first child that ever bestrode his 
father's staff, and fancied it into a courser shod w^ith wand, 
like those of Pindar. Alas for the poverty of human 
invention ! It cannot afford a hippogriff for an every- 
day occasion. The poor old crones, badgered by inquisi- 
tors into confessing they had been w^here they never were, 
were involved in the further necessity of explaining how 



WITCHCRAFT. 117 

the devil they got there. The only steed their parents 
had ever been rich enough to keep had been of this do- 
mestic sort, and they no doubt had ridden in this inex- 
pensive fashion, imagining themselves the grand dames 
they saw sometimes flash by, in the hai)py days of child- 
hood, now so far away. Forced to give a liow^ and un- 
able to conceive of mounting in the air without some- 
thing to sustain them, their bewildered wits naturally 
took refuge in some such simple subterfuge, and the 
broomstave, which might make part of the poorest 
house's fiu-niture, was the nearest at hand. If youth 
and good spirits could put such life into a dead stick 
once, why not age and evil spirits now % Moreover, 
what so likely as an emeritus implement of this sort to 
become the staff of a withered beldame, and thus to be 
naturally associated with her image % I remember very 
well a poor half-crazed creature, who always wore a scar- 
let cloak and leaned on such a stay, cursing and banning 
after a fashion that would infallibly have burned her two 
hundred years ago. But apart from any adventitious 
associations of later growth, it is certain that a very 
ancient belief gave to magic the power of imparting life, 
or the semblance of it, to inanimate things, and thus 
sometimes making servants of them. The wands of the 
Egyptian magicians were turned to serpents. Still 
nearer to the purpose is the capital story of Lucian, out 
of which Goethe made his Zauberlekrling, of the stick 
turned water-carrier. The classical theory of the witch's 
flight was driven to no such vulgar expedients, the oint- 
ment turning her into a bird for the nonce, as in Lucian 
and Apuleius. In those days, too, there was nothing 
known of any camp-meeting of witches and wizards, but 
each sorceress transformed herself that she might fly to 
her paramour. According to some of the Scotch stories, 
the witch, after bestriding her broomstick, must repeat 



118 WITCHCRAFT. 

the magic formula, Horse and Hattock ! The flitting of 

these ill-omened night-birds, like nearly all the general 

superstitions relating to witchcraft, mingles itself and is 

lost in a throng of figures more august.* Diana, Bertha, 

Holda, Abundia, Befana, once beautiful and divine, the 

bringers of blessing while men slept, became demons 

hauntino; the drear of darkness with terror and ominous 

suggestion. The process of disenchantment must have 

been a long one, and none can say how soon it became 

complete. Perhaps we may take Heine's word for it, 

that 

" Genau bei Weibem 
Weiss man niemals wo der Engel 
Aufhort und der Teufel anfangt." 

Once goblinized, Herodias joins them, doomed still to 
bear about the Baptist's head ; and Woden, who, first 
losing his identity in the Wild Huntsman, sinks by de- 
grees into the mere spook of a Suabian baron, sinfully 
fond of field-sports, and therefore punished with an 
eternal phantasm of them, " the hunter and the deer a 
shade," More and more vulgarized, the infernal train 
snatches up and sweeps along with it every lawless shape 
and wild conjecture of distempered fancy, streaming 
away at last into a comet's tail of wild-haired hags, 
eager with unnatural hate and more unnatural lust, 
the nightmare breed of some exorcist's or inquisitor's 
surfeit, whose own lie has turned upon him in sleep. 

As it is painfully interesting to trace the gradual de- 
generation of a poetic faith into the ritual of unimagina- 
tive Tupperism, so it is amusing to see pedantry cling- 
ing faithfully to the traditions of its prosaic nature, and 
holding sacred the dead shells that once housed a moral 
symbol. What a divine thing the oid^i^Q always has 
been and continues to be ! . And how the cast clothes of 
the mind continue always to be in fashion ! We turn 

* See Grimm's D. M., under Eexenfari, Wiiimdes Heer, &o. 



WITCHCRAFT. 110 

our coats without changing the cut of them. But was 
it possible for a man to change not only his skin but his 
nature 1 Were there such things as versijyelles, li/cau- 
tliropi, iverwolfs, and loupgarous ? In the earliest ages 
science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become 
science. The phenomena of nature, imaginatively rep- 
resented, were not long in becoming myths. These the 
primal poets reproduced again as symbols, no longer of 
physical, but of moral truths. By and by the profes- 
sional poets, in search of a subject, are struck by the 
fund of picturesque material lying unused in them, and 
work them up once more as narratives, with appropriate 
personages and decorations. Thence they take the further 
downward step into legend, and from that to supersti- 
tion. How many metamorphoses between the elder 
Edda and the Nibelungen, between Arcturus and the 
" Idyls of the King " ! Let a good, thorough-paced 
proser get hold of one of these stories, and he carefully 
desiccates them of whatever fancy may be left, till he 
has reduced them to the proper dryness of fact. King 
Lycaon, grandson by the spindleside of Oceanus, after 
passing through all the stages I have mentioned, becomes 
the ancestor of the werwolf. Ovid is put upon the stand 
as a witness, and testifies to the undoubted fact of the 
poor monarch's own metamorphosis : — 

" Terrritus ipse fugit, nactusque silentia ruris 
Exululat, frustraque loqui conatur." 

Does any one still doubt that men may be changed 
into beasts % Call Lucian, call Apuleius, call Homer, 
whose story of the companions of Ulysses made swine of 
by Circe, says Bodin, ii'est pas fahle. If that arch-]3atron 
of sorcerers, Wierus, is still unconvinced, and pronoun- 
ces the whole thing a delusion of diseased imagination, 
what does he say to Nebuchadnezzar ] Nay, let St. Aus- 
tin be subpoenaed, who declares that " in his time among 



120 WITCHCRAFT. 

the Alps sorceresses were common, who, by making 
travellers eat of a certain cheese, changed them into 
beasts of burden and then back again into men." Too 
confiding tourist, beware of Gruj/ere, especially at sup- 
per ! Then there was the Philosopher Ammonius, whose 
lectures were constantly attended by an ass, — a phe- 
nomenon not without parallel in more recent times, and 
all the more credible to Bodin, who had been professor 
of civil law. 

In one case we have fortunately the evidence of the 
ass himself. In Germany, two witches who kept an inn 
made an ass of a young actor, — not always a very pro- 
digious transformation it will be thought by those famil- 
iar with the stage. In his new shape he drew customers 
by his amusing tricks, — voluptates mille viatorihus exhi- 
hehat. But one day making his escape (having overheard 
the secret from his mistresses), he plunged into the wa- 
ter and was disasinized to the extent of recovering his 
original shape. *' Id Petrus Damianus, vir sua setate in- 
ter primes numerandus, cum rem sciscitatus est diligen- 
tissime ex hero, ex asino, ex mulieribus sagis confessis 
factum, Leoni VII. Papfe narravit, et postquam din in 
utramque partem coram Papa fuit disputatum, hoc tandem 
posse fieri fuit constitum." Bodin must have been de- 
lighted with this story, though perhaps as a Protestant he 
might have vilipended the infallible decision of the Pope 
in its favor. As for lycanthropy, that was too common 
in his own time to need any confirmation. It was no- 
torious to all men. " In Livonia, during the latter part 
of December, a villain goes about summoning the sor- 
cerers to meet at a certain place, and if they fail, the 
Devil scourges them thither with an iron rod, and that 
so sharply that the marks of it remain upon them. 
Their captain goes before ; and they, to the number of 
several thousands, follow him across a river, which 



WITCHCRAFT. 121 

passed, tliey change into wolves, and, casting themselves 
upon men and flocks, do all manner of damage." This 
we have on the authority of Melancthon's son-in-law, 
Gaspar Peucerus* Moreover, many books published in 
Germany affirm " that one of the greatest kings in 
Christendom, not long since dead, was often changed into 
a wolf" But what need of words 1 The conclusive 
proof remains, that many in our own day, being put to 
the torture, have confessed the fact, and been burned alive 
accordingly. The maintainors of the reality of witchcraft 
in the next century seem to have dropped the iverwolf by 
common consent, though supported by the same kind 
of evidence they relied on in other matters, namely, 
that of ocular witnesses, the confession of the accused, 
and general notoriety. So lately as 1765 the French 
peasants believed the " wdld beast of the Gevaudan " to 
be a loupgarou, and that, I think, is his last appear- 
ance. 

The particulars of the concubinage of wdtches with 
their familiars were discussed with a relish and a filthy 
minuteness worthy of Sanchez, Could children be born 
of these devilish amours ] Of course they could, said 
one party ; are there not plenty of cases in authentic 
history % Who was the father of Romulus and Remus % 
nay, not so very long ago, of Merlin % Another party 
denied the possibility of the thing altogether. Among 
these was Luther, who declared the children either to be 
supposititious, or else mere imps, disguised as innocent 
sucklings, and known as WechselMnder, or changelings, 
who were common enough, as everybody must be aware. 
Of the intercourse itself Luther had no doubts.* A 

* Some Catholics, indeed, affirmed that he himself was the son of a 
demon who lodged in his father's house under the semblance of a 
merchant. Wieriis says that a bishop preached to that eflfect in 1563, 
and gravely refutes the story. 
6 



122 WITCHCRAFT. 

third party took a middle ground, and believed that ver- 
min and toads might be the offspring of such amours. 
And how did the Demon, a mere spiritual essence, con- 
trive himself a body 1 Some would have it that he en- 
tered into dead bodies, by preference, of course, those of 
sorcerers. It is plain, from the confession of De la Rue, 
that this was the theory of his examiners. This also 
had historical evidence in its favor. There was the well- 
known leading case of the Bride of Corinth, for example. 
And but yesterday, as it were, at Crossen in Silesia, did 
not Christopher Monig, an apothecary's servant, come 
back after being buried, and do duty, as if nothing par- 
ticular had happened, putting up prescriptions as usual, 
and "pounding drugs in the mortar with a mighty 
noise " 1 Apothecaries seem to have been special vic- 
tims of these Satanic pranks, for another appeared at 
Reichenbach not long before, affirming that, " he had 
poisoned several men with his drugs," which certainly 
gives an air of truth to the story. Accordingly the 
Devil is represented as being unpleasantly cold to the 
touch. " Caietan escrit qu'une sorciere demanda un 
lour an diable pourquoy il ne se rechauffoit, qui fist re- 
sponse qu'il faisoit ce qu'il pouuoit." Poor Devil ! But 
there are cases in which the demon is represented as so 
hot that his grasp left a seared spot as black as charcoal. 
Perhaps some of them came from the torrid zone of their 
broad empire, and others from the thrilling regions of 
thick-ribbed ice. Those who were not satisfied with the 
dead-body theory contented themselves, like Dr. More, 
with that of '' adscititious particles," which has, to be 
sure, a more metaphysical and scholastic flavor about it. 
That the demons really came, either corporeally or 
through some diabolic illusion that amounted to the 
same thing, and that the witch devoted herself to him 
body and soul, scarce anybody was bold enough to doubt. 



WITCHCRAFT. 123 

To these familiars their venerable paramours gave en- 
dearing nicknames, such as My little Master, or My dear 
Martin, — the latter, probably, after the heresy of 
Luther, and when the rack was popish. The famous 
witch-finder Hopkins enables us to lengthen the list con- 
siderably. One witch whom he convicted, after being 
" kept from sleep two or three nights," called in five of 
her devilish servitors. The first was " Holt., who came 
in like a white kitling " ; the second " Jarmara, like a fat 
spaniel without any legs at all " ; the third, " Vinegar 
Tom, who was like a long-tailed greyhound with an head 
like an oxe, with a long tail and broad eyes, who, when 
this discoverer spoke to and bade him to the place pro- 
vided for him and his angells, immediately transformed 
himself into the shape of a child of foure yeares old, 
without a head, and gave half a dozen tiu-nes about the 
house and vanished at the doore " ; the fourth, " Sach 
and Sugar, like a black rabbet " ; the fifth, " Neivs, like a 
polcat." Other names of his finding were Elemauzer, 
Pywacket, Peck-in-the-Crown, Grizzel, and Greedygut, 
" which," he adds, " no mortal could invent." The name 
of Rohin, which we met with in the confession of Alice 
Duke, has, perhaps, wider associations than the woman 
herself dreamed of; for, through Robin des Bois and 
Robin Hood, it may be another of those scattered traces 
that lead us back to Woden. Probably, however, it is 
only our old friend Robin Goodfellow, whose namesake 
Knecht Ruprecht makes such a figure in the German 
fairy mythology. Possessed persons called in higher 
agencies, — Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Powers ; 
and among the witnesses against Urbain Grandier we 
find the names of Leviathan, Behemoth, Isaacarum, Be- 
laam, Asmodeus, and Beherit, who spoke French very 
well, but were remarkably poor Latinists, knowing, in- 
deed, almost as little of the language as if their youth 



124 WITCHCRAFT. 

had been spent in writing Latin verses.* A shrewd 
Scotch physician tried them with Gaehc, but they could 
make nothing of it. 

It was only when scepticism had begun to make itself 
uncomfortably inquisitive, that the Devil had any diffi- 
culty in making himself visible and even palpable. In 
simpler times, demons would almost seem to have made 
no inconsiderable part of the population. Trithemius 
tells of one who served as cook to the Bishop of Hilde- 
sheim (one shudders to think of the school where he had 
graduated as Cordon bleu), and who delectebatur esse 
cum hominibus, loquens, interrogans, respondens famili- 
ariter omnibus, aliquando visibiliter, aliquando invisibili- 
ter apparens. This last feat of " appearing invisibly " 
would have been worth seeing. In 1554, the Devil came 
of a Christmas eve to Lawrence Doner, a parish priest 
in Saxony, and asked to be confessed. " Admissus, 
horrendas adversus Christum filium Dei blasphemias 
evomuit. Verum cum virtute verbi Dei a parocho victus 
esset, intolerabili post se relicto foetore abiit." Splen- 
didly dressed, with two companions, he frequented an 
honest man's house at Rothenberg. He brought with 
him a piper or fiddler, and contrived feasts and dances 
under pretext of wooing the goodman's daughter. He 
boasted that he was a foreign nobleman of immense 
wealth, and, for a time, was as successful as an Italian 
courier has been known to be at one of our fashionable 
watering-places. But the importunity of the guest and 
his friends at length displicuit patrifamilias, who accord- 

* Melanctlion, however, used to tell of a possessed girl in Italy who 
knew no Latin, but the Devil in her, being asked by Bonamico, a 
Bolognese professor, what was the best verse in Virgil, answered at 
once : — 

" Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere divos," — 
a somewhat remarkable concession on the part of a fallen angel. 



'WITCHCRAFT. 125 

inglj one evening invited a minister of the Word to meet 
them at supper, and entered upon pious discourse with 
him from the word of God. Wherefore, seeking other 
matter of conversation, they said that there were many fa- 
cetious things more suitable to exhilarate the supper-table 
than the interpretation of Holy Writ, and begged that 
they might be no longer bored with Scripture. Thor- 
oughly satisfied by their singular way of thinking that 
his guests were diabolical, paterfamilias cries out in 
Latin worthy of Father Tom, '' Apagite, vos scelerati 
nebulones ! " This said, the tartarean impostor and his 
companions at once vanished with a great tumult, leav- 
ing behind them a most unpleasant fcetor and the bodies 
of three men who had been hanged. Perhaps if the 
clergyman-cm^e were faithfully tried upon the next for- 
tune-hunting count with a large real estate in whiskers 
and an imaginary one in Barataria, he also might vanish, 
leaving a strong smell of barber's-shop, and taking with 
him a body that will come to the gallows in due time. 
It were worth trying. Luther tells of a demon who 
served as famulus in a monastery, fetching beer for the 
monks, and always insisting on honest measure for his 
money. There is one case on record where the Devil 
appealed to the courts for protection in his rights. A 
monk, going to visit his mistress, fell dead as he was 
passing a bridge. The good and bad angel came to liti- 
gation about his soul. The case was referred by agree- 
ment to Richard, Duke of Normandy, who decided that 
the monk's body should be carried back to the bridge, 
and his soul restored to it by the claimants. If he per- 
severed in keeping his assignation, the Devil was to have 
him, if not, then the Angel. The monk, thus put upon 
his guard, turns back and saves his soul, such as it was.* 

* This story seems mediaeval and Gothic enough, but is hardly more 
so than bringing the case of the Fm-ies v. Orestes before the Areopagus, 



126 WITCHCRAFT. 

Perhaps the most impudent thing the Devil ever did was 
to open a school of magic in Toledo. The ceremony of 
graduation in this institution was peculiar. The senior 
class had all to run through a narrow cavern, and the 
venerable president was entitled to the hindmost, if he 
could catch him. Sometimes it happened that he caught 
only his shadow, and in that case the man who had been 
nimble enough to do what Goethe pronounces impossible, 
became the most profound magician of iis year. Hence 
our proverb of the Devil take the hindmost^ and Chamisso's 
story of Peter Schlemihl. 

There is no end of such stories. They were repeated 
and believed by tlie gravest and wisest men down to the 
end of the sixteenth century ; they were received un- 
doubtingly by the great majority down to the end of the 
seventeenth. The Devil was an easy way of accounting 
for what was beyond men's comprehension. He was the 
simple and satisfactory answer to all the conundrums of 
Natm-e. And what the Devil had not time to bestow his 
personal attention upon, the witch was always ready to do 
for him. Was a doctor at a loss about a case % How 
could he save his credit more cheaply than by pronoun- 
cing it witchcraft, and turning it over to the parson to be 
exorcised 1 Did a man's cow die suddenly, or his horse 
fall lame '\ Witchcraft ! Did one of those writers of 
controversial quartos, heavy as the stone of Diomed, feel 
a pain in the small of his back % Witchcraft ! Unhap- 
pily there were always ugly old women; and if you 
crossed them in any way, or did them a wrong, they 
were given to scolding and banning. If, within a year 

and putting Apollo in the witness-box, as ^schylus has done.. The 
classics, to be sure, are always so classic ! In the Eumenides, Apollo 
takes the place of the good angel. And why not ? For though a de- 
mon, and a lying one, he has crept in to the calendar under his other 
name of Helios as St. Hellas. Could any of his oracles have foretold 
this? 



WITCHCRAFT. 127 

or two after, anything should happen to you or yours, 
why, of course, old Mother Bombie or Goody Blake must 
be at the bottom of it. For it was perfectly well known 
that there were witches, (does not God's law say ex- 
pressly, " Suffer not a witch to live 1 ") and that they could 
cast a spell by the mere glance of their eyes, could cause 
you to pine away by melting a waxen image, could give 
you a pain wherever they liked by sticking pins into the 
same, could bring sickness into your house or into your 
barn by hiding a Devil's powder under the threshold ; 
and who knows what else % Worst of all, they could 
send a demon into your body, who would cause you to 
vomit pins, hair, pebbles, knives, — indeed, almost any- 
thing short of a cathedral, — without any fault of yours, 
utter through you the most impertinent things verhi 
ministro, and, in short,, make you the most important per- 
sonage in the parish for the time being. Meanwhile, you 
were an object of condolence and contribution to the 
whole neighborhood. What wonder if a lazy apprentice 
or servant-maid (Bekker gives several instances of the 
kind detected by him) should prefer being possessed, 
with its attendant perquisites, to drudging from morning 
till night % And to any one who has observed how com- 
mon a thing in certain states of mind self-connivance is, 
and how near it is to self-deception, it will not be sur- 
prising that some were, to all intents and purposes, really 
possessed. Who has never felt an almost irresistible 
temptation, and seemingly not self-originated, to let him- 
self go 1 to let his mind gallop and kick and curvet and 
roll like a horse turned loose 1 in short, as we Yankees 
say, " to speak out in meeting " 1 Who never had it 
suggested to him by the fiend to break in at a funeral 
with a real character of the deceased, instead of that 
Mrs. Grundyfied view of him which the clergyman is so 
painfully elaborating in his prayer 1 Kemove the pendu- 



128 WITCHCRAFT. 

lum of conventional routine, and the mental machinery 
runs on with a whir that gives a delightful excitement 
to sluggish temperaments, and is, perhaps, the natural 
relief of highly nervous organizations. The tyrant Will 
is dethroned, and the sceptre snatched by his frolic sis- 
ter Whim. This state of things, if continued, must be- 
come either insanity or imj)osture. But who can say 
precisely where consciousness ceases and a kind of auto- 
matic movement begins, the result of over-excitement ] 
The subjects of these strange disturbances have been 
almost always young women or girls at a critical period 
of their development. Many of the most remarkable 
cases have occurred in convents, and both there and else- 
where, as in other kinds of temjjorary nervous derange- 
ment, have proved contagious. Sometimes, as in the 
affair of the nuns of Loudon, there seems every reason 
to suspect a conspiracy ; but I am not quite ready to say 
that Grandier was the only victim, and that some of the 
energumens w^ere not unconscious tools in the hands of 
priestcraft and revenge. One thing is certain : that iu 
the dioceses of humanely sceptical prelates the cases of 
possession were sporadic only, and either cured, or at 
least hindered from becoming epidemic, b}^ episcopal 
mandate. Cardinal Mazarin, when Papal vice-legate at 
Avignon, made an end of the trade of exorcism within 
his government. 

But scepticism, down to the beginning of the eigh- 
teenth century, w^as the exception. Undoubting and 
often fanatical belief was the rule. It is easy enough to 
be astonished at it, still easier to misapprehend it. How 
could sane men have been deceived by such nursery- 
tales 1 Still more, how could they have suffered them- 
selves, on what seems to us such 2:)uerile evidence, to 
consent to such atrocious cruelties, nay, to urge them 
on 1 As to the belief, we should remember that the hu- 



WITCHCRAFT. 129 

man mind, when it sails by dead reclconing, without the 
possibihty of a fresh observation, perhaps without the 
instruments necessary to take one, will sometimes bring 
uji in very strange latitudes. Do we of the nineteenth 
century, then, always strike out boldly into the unland- 
marked deep of s2:)eculation and shape our courses by the 
stars, or do we not sometimes con our voyage by what 
seem to us the firm and familiar headlands of truth, 
planted by God himself, but which may, after all, be no 
more than an insubstantial mockery of cloud or airy 
juggle of mirage % The refraction of our own atmos- 
phere has by no means made an end of its tricks with 
the appearances of things in our little world of thought. 
The men of that day believed what they saw, or, as our 
generation would put it, what they thought they saw. 
Very good. The vast majority of men believe, and 
always will believe, on the same terms. When one 
comes along who can partly distinguish the thing see^^ 
from that travesty or distortion of it wdiich the thou- 
sand disturbing influences within him and without him 
would malce him sec, w^c call him a great philosopher. 
All our intellectual charts are engraved according to his 
observations, and we steer contentedly by them till some 
man whose brain rests on a still more unmovable basis 
corrects them still further by eliminating what his pred- 
ecessor thought he saw. We must account for many 
former aberrations in the moral world by the presence 
of more or less nebulous bodies of a certain gravity 
which modified the actual position of truth in its rela- 
tion to the mind, and which, if they have now vanished, 
have made way, perhaps, for others whose influence will 
in like manner be allowed for by posterity in their esti- 
mate of us. In matters of fiiith, astrology has by no 
means yet given place to astronomy, nor alchemy be- 
come chemistry, wdiich knows what to seek for and how 
6* I 



130 WITCHCRAFT. 

to find it. In the days of witchcraft all science was still 
in the condition of May-he; it is only just bringing 
itself to find a higher satisfaction in the imperturbablo 
Must-he of law. We should remember that what we call 
natural may have a very different meaning for one gen- 
eration from that which it has for another. The boun- 
dary between the " other " world and this ran till very 
lately, and at some points runs still, through a vast 
tract of unexplored border-land of very uncertain tenure. 
Even now the territor}^ which Reason holds firmly as 
Lord Warden of the marches during daylight, is subject 
to sudden raids of Imagination by night. But physical 
darkness is not the only one that lends opportunity to 
such incursions; and in midsummer 1692, when Eben- 
ezer Bapson, looking out of the fort at Gloucester in 
broad day, saw shapes of men, sometimes in blue coats 
like Indians, sometimes in white waistcoats like French- 
men, it seemed more natural to most men that they 
should be spectres than men of flesh and blood. Grant- 
ing the assumed premises, as nearly every one did, the 
syllogism was perfect. 

So much for the apparent reasonableness of the belief, 
since every man's logic is satisfied with a legitimate de- 
duction from his own postulates. Causes for the cruelty 
to which the belief led are not further to seek. Toward 
no crime have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly 
cruel as in punishing difference of belief, and the first 
systematic persecutions for witchcraft began with the in- 
quisitors in the South of France in the thirteenth cen- 
tury. It was then and there that the charge of sexual 
uncleanness with demons was first devised. Persecuted 
heretics would naturally meet in darkness and secret, 
and it was easy to blacken such meetings with the accu- 
sation of deeds so foul as to shun the light of day and 
the eyes of men. They met to renounce God and wor- 



WITCHCRAFT. 131 

ship the Devil. But this was not enough. To excite 
popular hatred and keep it fiercely alive, fear must be 
mingled with it ; and this end was reached by making 
the heretic also a sorcerer, who, by the Devil's help, could 
and would work all ma,nner of fiendish mischief. When 
by this means the belief in a league between witch and 
demon had become firmly established, witchcraft grew 
into a well-defined crime, hateful enough in itself to fur- 
nish pastime for the torturer and food for the fagot. In 
the fifteenth century, witches were burned by thousands, 
and it may well be doubted if all paganism together was 
ever guilty of so many human sacrifices in the same 
space of time. In the sixteenth, these holocausts were 
appealed to as conclusive evidence of the reality of the 
crime, terror was again aroused, the more vindictive that 
its sources were so vague and intangible, and cruelty was 
the natural consequence. Nothing but an abject panic, 
in which the whole use of reason, except as a mill to 
grind out syllogisms, was altogether lost, will account for 
some chapters in Bodin's Demonomanie. Men were sur- 
rounded by a forever-renewed conspiracy whose ramifica- 
tions they could not trace, though they might now and 
then lay hold on one of its associates. Protestant and 
Catholic might agree in nothing else, but they were 
unanimous in their dread of this invisible enemy. If 
fright could turn civilized Englishmen into savage Iro- 
quois during the imagined negro plots of New York in 
1741 and of Jamaica in 1865, if the same invisible om- 
nipresence of Fenianism shall be able to work the same 
miracle, as it perhaps will, next year in England itself, 
why need we be astonished that the blows should have 
fallen upon many an innocent head when men were 
striking wildly in self-defence, as they supposed, against 
the unindictable Powers of Darkness, against a plot 
which could be carried on by human agents, but with 



132 WITCHCRAFT. 

invisible accessories and by siij^ernatural means 1 In 
the seventeenth century an element was added which 
pretty well supplied the place of heresy as a sharpener 
of hatred and an awakener of indefinable suspicion. 
Scepticism had been born into the world, almost more 
hateful than heresj^ because it had the manners of 
good society and contented itself with a smile, a shrug, 
an almost imperceptible lift of the eyebrow, — a kind 
of reasoning especially exasperating to disputants of 
the old school, who still cared about victory, even 
when they did not about the principles involved in the 
debate. 

The Puritan emigration to New England took place at 
a time when the belief in diabolic agency had been 
hardly called in question, much less shaken. The early 
adventurers brought it with them to a country in every 
way fitted, not only to keep it alive, but to feed it into 
greater vigor. The solitude of the wilderness (and soli- 
tude alone, by dis-furnishing the brain of its common- 
place associations, makes it an a2:)t theatre for the delu- 
sions of imagination), the nightly forest noises, the 
glimjDse, perhaps, through the leaves, of a painted sav- 
age face, uncertain whether of redman or Devil, but 
more likely of the latter, above all, that measureless 
mystery of the unknown and conjectural stretching away 
illimitable on all sides and vexing the mind, somewhat 
as physical darkness does, with intimation and misgiving, 
— under all these influences, whatever seeds of super- 
stition had in any way got over from the Old "World 
would find an only too congenial soil in the New. The 
leaders of that emigTation believed and taught that de- 
mons loved to dwell in waste and wooded places, that 
the Indians did homage to the bodily presence of the 
Devil, and that he was especially enraged against those 
who had planted an outpost of the true faith upon this 



WITCHCRAFT. 133 

continent hitherto all his own. In the third generation 
of the settlement, in proportion as living faith decayed, 
the clergy insisted all the more strongly on the tradi- 
tions of the elders, and as they all placed the sources of 
goodness and religion in some inaccessible Other World 
rather than in the soul of man himself, they clung to 
every shred of the supernatural as proof of the existence 
of that Other World, and of its interest in the affairs of 
this. They had the countenance of all the great theo- 
logians, Catholic as well as Protestant, of the leaders of 
the Reformation, and in their own day of such men as 
More and Glanvil and Baxter.* If to all these causes, 
more or less operative in 1692, we add the harassing 
excitement of an Indian war (urged on by Satan in his 
hatred of the churches), with its daily and nightly ap- 
prehensions and alarms, we shall be less astonished that 
the delusion in Salem Village rose so high than that it 
subsided so soon. 

I have already said that it was religious antipathy or 
clerical interest that first made heresy and witchcraft 
identical and cast them into the same expiatory fire. 
The invention was a Catholic one, but it is plain that 
Protestants soon learned its value and were not slow in 
making it a plague to the inventor. It was not till after 
the Reformation that there was any systematic hunting 
out of witches in England. Then, no doubt, the inno- 

* Mr. Leckie, in his admirable chapter on Witchcraft, gives a little 
more credit to the enlightenment of the Church of England in this 
matter than it would seem fairly to deserve. More and Glanvil were 
faithful sons of the Church ; and if the persecution of witches was es- 
pecially rife during the ascendency of the Puritans, it was because they 
happened to be in power while there was a reaction against Sadducism. 
All the convictions were under the statute of James I., who was no 
Puritan. After the restoration, the reaction was the other way, and 
Hobbism became the fashion. It is more philosophical to say that the 
age believes this and that, than that the particular men who live in it 
do so. 



134 WITCHCRAFT. 

cent charms and rhyming prayers of the old rehgion 
were regarded as incantations, and twisted into evidence 
as'ainst miserable beldames who mumbled over in their 

o 

dotage what they had learned at their mother's knee. 
It is plain, at least, that this was one of Agnes Simp- 
son's crimes. 

But as respects the frivolity of the proof adduced, 
there was nothing to choose between Catholic and Prot- 
estant. Out of civil and canon law a net was woven 
through whose meshes there was no escape, and into it 
the victims were driven by popular clamor. Suspicion 
of witchcraft was justified by general report, by the ill- 
looks of the suspected, by being silent when accused, by 
her mother's having been a witch, by flight, by exclaim- 
ing when arrested, / am lost I by a habit of using im- 
precations, by the evidence of two witnesses, by the 
accusation of a man on his death-bed, by a habit of be- 
ing away from home at night, by fifty other things 
equally grave. Anybody might be an accuser, — a per- 
sonal enemy, an infamous person, a child, parent, broth- 
er, or sister. Once accused, the culprit was not to be 
allowed to touch the gi'ound on the way to prison, w^as 
not to be left alone there lest she have interviews with 
the Devil and get from him the means of being insensi- 
ble under torture, was to be stripped and shaved in order 
to prevent her concealing some charm, or to facilitate 
the finding of witch-marks. Her right thumb tied to 
her left great-toe, and vice versa, she was thrown into the 
water. If she floated, she was a witch ; if she sank and 
was drowned, she was lucky. This trial, as old as the 
days of Pliny the Elder, was gone out of fashion, the 
author of De Lamiis assures us, in his day, everywhere 
but in Westphalia. " On halfproof or strong presump- 
tion," says Bodin, the judge may proceed to torture. 
If the witch did not shed tears under the rack, it was 



WITCHCRAFT. 135 

almost conclusive of guilt. On this topic of tortui'e he 
grows eloquent. The rack does very well, but to thrust 
splinters between the nails and flesh of hands and feet 
" is the most excellent gehenna of all, and practised in 
Turkey." That of Florence, where they seat the crim- 
inal in a hanging chair so contrived that if he drop 
asleep it overturns and leaves him hanging by a rope 
which wi'enches his arms backwards, is perhaps even bet- 
ter, " for the limbs are not broken, and without trouble or 
labor one gets out the truth." It is well in carrying the 
accused to the chamber of torture to cause some in the 
next room to shriek fearfully as if on the rack, that the}' 
may be terrified into confession. It is proper to tell 
them that their accomplices have confessed and accused 
them ("though they have done no such thing") that 
they may do the same out of revenge. The judge may 
also with a good conscience lie to the prisoner and tell 
her that if she admit her guilt, she may be pardoned. 
This is Bodin's opinion, but Walburger, writing a cen- 
tury later, concludes that the judge may go to any ex- 
tent citra meiidacium, this side of lying. He may tell 
the witch that, he will be favorable, meaning to the 
Commonwealth ; that he will see that she has a new 
house built for her, that is, a wooden one to burn her 
in ; that her confession will be most useful in saving her 
life, to wit, her life eternal. There seems little difference 
between the German's white lies and the Frenchman's 
black ones. As to punishment, Bodin is fierce for burn- 
ing. Though a Protestant, he quotes with evident satis- 
faction a decision of the magistrates that one " who had 
eaten flesh on a Friday shoidd be burned alive unless he 
repented, and if he repented, yet he was hanged out of 
compassion." A child under twelve who will not confess 
meeting with the Devil should be put to death if con- 
victed of the fact, though Bodin allows that Satan made 



136 WITCHCRAFT. 

no express compact with those who had not arrived at 
puberty. This he learned from the examination of 
Jeanne HarvilUer, who deposed, " that, though her 
mother dedicated her to Satan so soon as she was born, 
yet she was not married to him, nor did he demand that, 
or her renunciation of God, till she had attained the age 
of twelve." 

There is no more painful reading than this, except 
the trials of the witches themselves. These aw\aken, by 
turns, pity, indignation, disgust, and dread, — dread at 
the thought of what the human mind may be brought 
to believe not only probable, but proven. But it is well 
to be put upon our guard by lessons of this kind, for the 
wisest man is in some respects little better than a mad- 
man in a strait-waistcoat of habit, public opinion, pru- 
dence, or the like. Scepticism began at length to make 
itself felt, but it spread slowly and was shy of proclaim- 
ing itself. The orthodox party was not backward to 
charge with sorcery whoever doubted their facts or pitied 
their victims. Bodin says that it is good cause of sus- 
picion against a judge if he turn the matter into ridicule, 
or incline toward mercy. The mob, as it always is, was 
orthodox. It was dangerous to doubt, it might be fatal 
to deny. In 1453 Guillaume de Lure was burned at 
Poitiers on his own confession of a compact with Satan, 
by which he agreed '' to preach and did preach that 
everything told of sorcerers was mere fable, and that it 
was cruelly done to condemn them to death." This con- 
tract was found among his papers signed " with the 
Devil's own claw," as Howell says speaking of a similar 
case. It is not to be wondered at that the earlier 
doubters were cautious. There was literally a reign of 
terror, and during such regimes men are commonly found 
more eager to be informers and accusers than of counsel 
for the defence. Peter of Abano is reckoned among 



WITCHCRAFT. 137 

the earliest unbelievers who declared himself openly.* 
Chaucer was certainly a sceptic, as appears by the open- 
ing of the Wife of Bath's Tale. Wierus, a German 
physician, was the first to undertake (1563) a refutation 
of the facts and assumptions on w^hich the prosecutions 
for witchcraft w^ere based. His explanation of the phe- 
nomena is mainly physiological. Mr. Leckie hardly 
states his position correctly, in saying, " that he never 
dreamed of restricting the sphere of the supernatural." 
Wierus went as far as he dared. No one can read his 
book without feeling that he insinuates much more than 
he positively affirms or denies. He would have weak- 
ened his cause if he had seemed to disbelieve in demo- 
niacal possession, since that had the supposed warrant of 
Scripture ; but it may be questioned whether he uses 
the words Satan and Demon in any other way than that 
in which many people still use the word Nature. He 
was forced to accept certain premises of his oj)ponents 
by the line of his argument. When he recites incredi- 
ble stories without comment, it is not that he believes 
them, but that he thinks their absurdity obvious. That 
he wrote under a certain restraint is plain from the Colo- 
phon of his book, where he says : " Nihil autem hie ita 
assertum volo, quod sequiori judicio Catholicse Christi 
Ecclesise non omnino submittam, palinodia mox spon- 
tanea emendaturus, si erroris alicubi convincar." A great 
deal of latent and timid scepticism seems to have been 
brought to the surface by his work. Many eminent per- 
sons wrote to him in gratitude and commendation. In 
the Preface to his shorter treatise De Lamiis (which is a 

* I have no means of ascertaining wlietlier he did or not. He was 
more probably charged with it by tlie inquisitors. Mr. Leckie seems 
to write of him only upon hearsay, for he calls him Peter " of Apono," 
apparently translating a French translation of the Latin " Aponus." 
The only book attributed to him that I have ever seen is itself a kind 
of manual of magic. 



138 WITCHCRAFT. 

mere abridgment), he thanks God that his labors had 
*'in many places caused the cruelty against innocent 
blood to slacken," and that " some more distinguished 
judges treat more mildly and even absolve from capital 
punishment the wretched old women branded with the 
odious name of witches by the populace." In the Pseu- 
domonarchia Dcemonum, he gives a kind of census of the 
diabolic kingdom,* but evidently with secret intention 
of making the whole thing ridiculous, or it would not 
have so stirred the bile of Bodin. AVierus was saluted 
by many contemporaries as a Hercules who destro^^ed 
monsters, and himself not immodestly claimed the civic 
wreath for having saved the lives of fellow-citizens. 
Posterity should not forget a man who really did an 
honest life's work for humanity and the liberation of 
thought. From one of the letters appended to his book 
we learn that Jacobus Savagius, a physician of Antwerp, 
had twenty years before written a treatise with the same 
design, but confining himself to the medical argument 
exclusively. He was, however, prevented from publish- 
ing it by death. It is pleasant to learn from Bodin that 
Alciato, the famous lawyer and emblematist, was one of 
those who " laughed and made others laugh at the evi- 
dence relied on at the trials, insisting that witchcraft 
was a thing impossible and fabulous, and so softened the 
hearts of judges (in spite of the fact that an inquisitor 
had caused to burn more than a hundred sorcerers in 
Piedmont), that all the accused escaped." In England, 
Reginald Scot was the first to enter the lists in behalf 
of those who had no champion. His book, published in 
1584, is full of manly sense and spirit, above all, of a 
tender humanity that gives it a warmth which we miss 
in every other written on the same side. In the dedica- 

* " With the names and surnames," says Bodin, indignantly, " of 
seventy-two princes, and of seven million four hundred and five thou- 
sand nine hundred and twenty-six devils, errors excepted. " 



WITCHCRAFT. 139 

tion to Sir Roger Manwood he says : " I renounce all 
protection and despise all friendship that might serve to- 
wards the suppressing or supplanting of truth." To his 
kinsman, Sir Thomas Scot, he writes : " My greatest 
adversaries are young ignorance and old custom; for 
what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it is so 
superstitiously pursued of some, as though no eiTor 
could be acquainted with custom." And in his Preface 
he thus states his motives : " God that knoweth my 
heart is witness, and you that read my book shall see, 
that my drift and pui-pose in this enterprise tendeth 
only to these respects. First, that the glory and power 
of God be not so abridged and abased as to be thrust 
into the hand or lip of a lewd old woman, whereby the 
work of the Creator should be attributed to the power 
of a creature. Secondly, that the religion of the Gos- 
pel may be seen to stand without such peevish trump- 
ery. Thirdly, that lawful favor and Christian compas- 
sion be rather used towards these poor souls than rigor 
and extremity. Because they which are commonly ac- 
cused of witchcraft are the least sufficient of all other 
persons to speak for themselves, as having the most 
base and simple education of all others, the extremity 
of their age giving them leave to dote, their poverty to 
beg, their wrongs to chide and threaten (as being void 
of any other way of revenge), their humor melancholi- 
cal to be full of imaginations, from whence chiefly pro- 

ceedeth the vanity of their confessions And for 

so much as the mighty help themselves together, and 
the poor widow's cry, though it reach to Heaven, is 
scarce heard here upon earth, I thought good (according 
to my poor ability) to make intercession that some part 
of common rigor and some points of hasty judgment may 
be advised upon." .... The case is nowhere put with 
more point, or urged with more sense and eloquence, 



140 WITCHCRAFT. 

than by Scot, whose book contains also more curious 
matter, in the way of charms, incantations, exorcisms, 
and feats of legerdemain, than any other of the kind. - 

Other books followed on the same side, of which Bek- 
ker's, published about a century later, was the most im- 
portant. It is well reasoned, learned, and tedious to a 
masterly degree. But though the belief in witchcraft 
might be shaken, it still had the advantage of being 
on the whole orthodox and respectable. Wise men, as 
usual, insisted on regarding superstition as of one sub- 
stance with faith, and objected to any scouring of the 
shield of religion, lest, like that of Cornelius Scriblerus, 
it should suddenly turn out to be nothing more than 
"a paltry old sconce with the nozzle broke off." The 
Devil continued to be the only recognized Minister Resi- 
dent of God upon earth. When we remember that one 
man's accusation on his death-bed was enough to consti- 
tute grave presumption of witchcraft, it might seem 
singular that dying testimonies were so long of no avail 
against the common credulity. But it should be re- 
membered that men are mentally no less than corporeal- 
ly gregarious, and that public oj^inion, the fetish even 
of the nineteenth century, makes men, whether for 
good or ill, into a mob, which either hurries the individ- 
ual judgment along with it, or runs over and tramples it 
into insensibility. Those who are so fortunate as to oc- 
cupy the philosophical position of spectators ah extra 
are very few in any generation. 

There were exceptions, it is true, but the old cruel- 
ties went on. In 1610 a case came before the tribunal of 
the Tourelle, and when the counsel for the accused argued 
at some length that sorcery was ineffectual, and that 
the Devil could not destroy life, President Seguier told 
him that he might spare his breath, since the court had 
long been convinced on those points. And yet two 



WITCHCRAFT. 141 

« 

years later the grand-vicars of the Bishop of Beauvais 

solemnly summoned Beelzebuth, Satan, Motel a, and 
Briffaut, with the four legions under their charge, to ap- 
pear and sign an agreement never again to enter the 
bodies of reasonable or other creatures, under pain of 
excommunication ! If they refused, they were to be 
given over to " the power of hell to be tormented and 
tortured more than was customary, three thousand 
years after the judgment." Under this proclamation 
they all came in, like reconstructed rebels, and signed 
whatever document was put before them. Toward the 
middle of the seventeenth century, the safe thing was 
still to believe, or at any rate to profess belief. Sir 
Thomas Browne, though he had written an exposure of 
" Vulgar Errors," testified in court to his faith in the 
possibility of witchcraft. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his 
" Observations on the Keligio Medici," takes, perhaps, as 
advanced ground as any, when he says : "Neither do I 
deny there are witches ; I only reserve my assent till I 
meet with stronger motives to carry it." The position 
of even enlightened men of the world in that age 
might be called semi-sceptical. La Bruyere, no doubt, 
expresses the average of opinion : " Que penser de la 
magie et du sortilege "? La theorie en est obscurcie, les 
princij)es vagues, incertains, et qui approchent du vi- 
sionnaire ; mais il y a des faits embarrassants, afiirmes 
par des hommes graves qui les ont vus ; les admettre 
tons, ou les nier tons, parait un egal inconvenient, et 
j'ose dire qu'en cela comme en toutes les choses extraor- 
dinaires et qui sortent des communes regies, il y a un 
parti a trouver entre les ames credules et les esprits 
forts." * Montaigne, to be sure, had long before de- 
clared his entire disbelief, and jet the Parliament of 
Bourdeaux, his own city, condemned a man to be biu-ned 

* Cited by Maury, p. 221, note 4. 



142 WITCHCRAFT. 

as a noileur d! aiguilleUes so lately aa 1718. Indeed, it 
was not, says Maury, till the first quarter of the eigh- 
teenth century that one might safely publish his incre- 
dulity in France. In Scotland, witches were burned for 
the last time in 1722. Garinet cites the case of a girl 
near Amiens possessed by three demons, — Mimi, Zozo, 
and Crapoulet, — in 1816. 

The two beautiful volumes of Mr. Upham are, so far 
as I know, unique in their kind. It is, in some re- 
spects, a clinical lecture on human nature, as well as on 
the special epidemical disease under which the patient 
is laboring. He has written not merely a history of the 
so-called Salem Witchcraft, but has made it intelligible 
by a minute account of the place where the delusion 
took its rise, the persons concerned in it, whether as 
actors or sufferers, and the circumstances which led to 
it. By deeds, wills, and the records of courts and 
churches, by plans, maps, and drawings, he has re- 
created Salem Village as it was two hundred years ago, 
so that we seem wellnigh to talk with its people and 
walk over its fields, or through its cart-tracks and 
bridle-roads. We are made partners in parish and vil- 
lage feuds, we share in the chimney-corner gossip, and 
learn for the first time how many mean and merely 
human motives, whether consciously or unconsciously, 
gave impulse and intensity to the passions of the actors 
in that memorable tragedy which dealt the death-blow 
in this country to the belief in Satanic compacts. Mr. 
Upham's minute details, which give us something like a 
photographic picture of the in-door and out-door scen- 
ery that surrounded the events he narrates, help us 
materially to understand their origin and the course 
they inevitably took. In this respect his book is origi- 
nal and full of new interest. To know the kind of life 
these people led, the kind of place they dwelt in, and 



WITCHCRAFT. 143 

tlie tenor of their thought, makes much real to us that 
Tvas conjectural before. The influences of outward na- 
ture, of remoteness from the main highways of the 
world's thought, of seclusion, as the foster-mother of 
traditionary beliefs, of a hard life and unwholesome diet 
in exciting or obscuring the brain through the nerves 
and stomach, have been hitherto commonly overlooked 
in accounting for the phenomena of witchcraft. The 
great persecutions for this imaginary crime have always 
taken place in lonely places, among the poor, the igno- 
rant, and, above all, the ill-fed. 

One of the best things in Mr. Upham's book is the 
portrait of Parris, the minister of Salem Village, in 
whose household the children who, under the assumed 
possession of evil spirits, became accusers and witnesses, 
began their tricks. He is shown to us pedantic and 
something of a martinet in church discipline and cere- 
mony, somewhat inclined to magnify his office, fond of 
controversy as he was skilful and rather unscrupulous 
in the conduct of it, and glad of any occasion to make 
himself prominent. Was he the imconscious agent 
of his own superstition, or did he take advantage of 
the superstition of others for purposes of his own 1 
The question is not an easy one to answer. Men will 
sacrifice everything, sometimes even themselves, to 
their pride of logic and their love of victory. Bodin 
loses sight of humanity altogether in his eagerness to 
make out his case, and display his learning in the canon 
and civil law. He does not scruple to exaggerate, to 
misquote, to charge his antagonists with atheism, sor- 
cery, and insidious designs against religion and society, 
that he may persuade the jury of Europe to bring in a 
verdict of guilty.* Yet there is no reason to doubt 

* There is a kind of compensation in the fact that he himself lived 
to be accused of sorceiy and Judaism. 



144 WITCHCRAFT. 

the sincerity of his behef. Was Parris equally sincere ? 
On the whole, I think it likely that he was. But if we 
acquit Parris, w^hat shall we say of the demoniacal 
girls 1 The 23robability seems to be that those who be- 
gan in harmless deceit found themselves at length in- 
volved so deeply, that dread of shame and punishment 
drove them to an extremity where their only choice w^as 
between sacrificing themselves, or others to save them- 
selves. It is not unlikely that some of the younger 
girls were so far carried along by imitation or imagina- 
tive sympathy as in some degree to " credit their own 
lie." Any one who has watched or made experiments 
in animal magnetism knows how easy it is to persuade 
young w^omen of nervous temperaments that they are 
doing that by the will of another w^hich they really do 
by an obscure volition of their own, under the influence 
of an imagination adroitly guided by the magnetizer. 
The marvellous is so fascinating, that nine persons in 
ten, if once persuaded that a thing is possible, are eager 
to believe it probable, and at last cunning in convincing 
themselves that it is proven. But it is impossible to 
believe that the possessed girls in this case did not know 
how the pins they vomited got into their mouths. Mr. 
Upham has shown, in the case of Anne Putnam, Jr., 
an hereditary tendency to hallucination, if not insanity. 
One of her uncles had seen the Devil by .broad day- 
light in the novel disguise of a blue boar, in which 
shape, as a tavern sign, he had doubtless proved more 
seductive than in his more ordinary transfigurations. 
A great deal of light is let in upon the question of 
whether there was deliberate imposture or no, by the 
narrative of Rev. Mr. Turell of Medford, written in 
1728, which gives us all the particulars of a case of 
pretended possession in Littleton, eight years before. 
The eldest of three sisters began the game, and found 




WITCHCRAFT. 145 

herself before long obliged to take the next in age into 
her confidence. By and by the youngest, finding her 
sisters pitied and caressed on account of their supposed 
sufterings while she was neglected, began to play off the 
same tricks. The usual phenomena followed. They 
w^ere convulsed, they fell into swoons, they were pinched 
and bruised, they were found in the water, on the top of 
a tree or of the barn. To these j)l^ces they said they 
were conveyed through the air, and there were those 
who held seen them flying, which shows how strong is 
the impulse which prompts men to conspire with their 
own delusion, where the marvellous is concerned. The 
girls did whatever they had heard or read that was 
common in such cases. They even accused a respect- 
able neighbor as the cause of their torments. There 
were some doubters, but " so far as I can learn," says 
Turell, " the greater number believed and said they 
w^ere under the evil hand, or possessed by Satan." But 
the most interesting fact of all is supplied by the confes- 
sion of the elder sister, made eight years later under 
stress of remorse. Having once begun, they found 
returning more tedious than going o'er. To keep up 
their cheat made life a burden to them, but they could 
not stop. Thirty years earlier, their juggling might 
have proved as disastrous as that at Salem Village. 
There, parish and boundary feuds had set enmity be- 
tween neighbors, and the girls, called on to say who 
troubled them, cried out upon those whom they had 
been w^ont to hear called by hard names at home. 
They probably had no notion what a frightful ending 
their comedy was to have ; but at any rate they were 
powerless, for the reins had passed out of their hands 
into the sterner grasp of minister and magistrate. They 
were dragged deeper and deeper, as men always are by 
their own lie, 

7 J 



146 WITCHCRAFT. 

The proceedings at the Salem trials are sometimes 
spoken of as if they were exceptionally cruel. But, in 
fact, if compared with others of the same kind, they 
were exceptionally, humane. At a time when Baxter 
could tell with satisfaction of a " reading parson " eigh- 
ty years old, who, after being kept awake five days 
and nights, confessed his dealings with the Devil, it is 
rather wonderful that no mode of torture other than 
mental was tried at Salem. Nor were the magistrates 
more besotted or unfair than usual in dealing with the 
evidence. Now and then, it is true, a man more scep- 
tical or intelligent than common had exposed some pre- 
tended demoniac. The Bishop of Orleans, in 1598, 
read aloud to Martha Brossier the story of the Ephe- . 
sian Widow, and the girl, hearing Latin, and taking it 
for Scripture, went forthwith into convulsions. He 
found also that the Devil who possessed her coiild not 
distinguish holy fi'om profane water. But that there 
were deceptions did not shake the general belief in the 
reality of possession. The proof in such cases could 
not and ought not to be subjected to the ordinary tests. 
'' If many natural things," saj^s Bodin, " are incred- 
ible and some of them incomprehensible, a fortiori the 
power of supernatural intelligences and the doings of 
spirits are incomprehensible. But error has risen to its 
height in this, that those who have denied the power of 
spirits and the doings of sorcerers have wished to dis- 
pute physically concerning supernatural or metaphysical 
things, which is a notable incongruity." That the girls 
were really possessed, seemed to Stoughton and his col- 
leagues the most rational theory, — a theory in har- 
mony with the i»est of their creed, and sustained by the 
unanimous consent of pious men as well as the evidence 
of that most cunning and least suspected of all sor- 
cerers, the Past, — and how confront or cross-examine 



WITCHCRAFT. 147 

invisible witnesses, especially witnesses whom it was a 
kind of impiety to doubt 1 Evidence that would have 
been convincing in ordinary cases was of no weight 
against the general prepossession. In 1659 the house 
of a man in Brightling, Sussex, was troubled by a de- 
mon, who set it on fire at various times, and was con- 
tinually throwing things about. The clergy of the 
neighborhood held a day of fasting and prayer in conse- 
quence. A maid-servant was afterwards detected as 
the cause of the missiles. But this did not in the least 
stagger Mr. Bennet, minister of the parish, who merely 
says : " There was a seeming blur cast, though not on 
the whole, yet upon some part of it, for their servant- 
girl was at last found throwing some things," and goes 
off into a eulogium on the " efficacy of j^rc'vyer." 

In one respect, to which Mr. Upham first gives the 
importance it deserves, the Salem trials were distin- 
guished from all others. Though some of the accused 
had been terrified into confession, yet not one perse- 
vered in it, but all died protesting their innocence, and 
with unshaken constancy, though an acknowledgment 
of guilt would have saved the lives of all. This martyr 
proof of the efficacy of Puritanism in the character and 
conscience may be allowed to outweigh a great many 
sneers at Puritan fanaticism. It is at least a testimony 
to the courage and constancy which a profound religious 
sentiment had made common among the people of 
• whom these sufferers were average representatives. 
The accused also were not, as was commonly the case, 
abandoned by their friends. In all the trials of this 
kind there is nothing so pathetic as the picture of Jona- 
than Gary holding up the weary arms of his wife during 
her trial, and wiping away the sweat from her brow and 
the tears from her face. Another remarkable fact is 
this, that while in other countries the delusion was ex- 



148 WITCHCRAFT. 

tingTiished by the incredulity of the upper classes and 
the interference of authority, here the reaction took 
place among the people themselves, and here only was 
an attempt made at some legislative restitution, how- 
ever inadequate. Mr. Upham's sincere and honest 
narrative, w^hile it never condescends to a formal plea, 
is the best vindication possible of a community which 
was itself the greatest sufferer by the persecution which 
its credulity engendered. 

If any lesson may be drawn from the tragical and too 
often disgustful history of witchcraft, it is not one of 
exultation at our superior enlightenment or shame at 
the shortcomings of the human intellect. It is rather 
one of charity and self-distrust. When we see what in- 
human absurdities men in other respects wise and good 
have clung to as the corner-stone of their faith in im- 
mortality and a divine ordering of the world, may we 
not suspect that those who now maintain political or 
other doctrines which seem to us barbarous and unen- 
lightened, may be, for all that, in the main as virtuous 
and clear-sighted as oiu-selves 1 While we maintain our 
own side with an honest ardor of conviction, let us not 
forget to allow for mortal incompetence in the other. 
And if there are men who regret the Good Old Times, 
without too clear a notion of what they were, they 
should at least be thankful that we are rid of that 
misguided energy of faith which justified conscience 
in making men unrelentingly cruel. Even Mr. Leckie 
softens a little at the thought of the many innocent 
and beautifid beliefs of which a growing scepticism has 
robbed us in the decay of supernaturalism. But we 
need not despair ; for, after all, scepticism is first 
cousin of credulity, and we are not surprised to see the 
tough doubter jNIontaigne hanging up his offerings in 
the shrine of o\u^ Lady of Loreto. Scepticism commonly 



WITCHCRAFT. 149 

takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is 
the very quaHty of mind most likely to seek for sen- 
sual proof of siipersensiial things. If one came from 
the dead, it could not believe ; and yet it longs for such 
a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one. 
So long as night is left and the helplessness of dream, 
the wonderful will not cease from among men. While 
we are the solitary prisoners of darkness, the witch 
seats herself at the loom of thought, and weaves 
strange figures into the web that looks so familiar and 
ordinary in the dry light of every-day. Just as we 
are flattering ourselves that the old spirit of sorcery is 
laid, behold the tables are tipping and the floors drum- 
ming all over Christendom. The faculty of wonder is 
not defunct, but is only getting more and more emanci- 
pated from the unnatural service of terror, and restored 
to its proper function as a minister of delight. A 
higher mode of belief is the best exerciser, because it 
makes the spiritual at one with the actual world instead 
of hostile, or at best alien. It has been the grossly 
material interpretations of spiritual doctrine that 
have given occasion to the two extremes of suj)erstition 
and unbelief. While the resurrection of the body has 
been insisted on, that resurrection from the body which 
is the privilege of all has been forgotten. Superstition 
in its baneful form was largely due to the enforcement 
by the Church of arguments that involved a petitio 
pri7icipii, for it is the miserable necessity of all false 
logic to accept of very ignoble allies. Fear became at 
length its chief expedient for the maintenance of its 
power ; and as there is a beneficent necessity laid upon 
a majority of mankind to sustain and perpetuate the 
order of things they are born into, and to make all new 
ideas manfully prove their right, first, to be at allj and 
then to be heard, many even superior minds dreaded 



150 WITCHCRAFT. 

the tearing away of vicious accretions as dangerous to 
the whole edifice of religion and society. But if this 
old ghost be fading away in what we regard as the 
dawn of a better day, we may console ourselves by 
thinking that perhaps, after all, we are not so much 
wiser than our ancestors. The rappings, the trance 
mediums, the visions of hands without bodies, the 
sounding of musical instruments without visible fingers, 
the miraculous inscriptions on the naked flesh, the en- 
livenment of furniture, — we have invented none of 
them, they are all heirlooms. There is surely room for 
yet another schoolmaster, when a score of seers adver- 
tise themselves in Boston newspapers. And if the me- 
taphysicians can never rest till they have taken their 
watch to pieces and have arrived at a happy positivism 
as to its structure, though at the risk of bringing it to 
a no-go, we may be sure that the majority will always 
take more satisfaction in seeing its hands mysteriously 
move on, even if they should err a little as to the pre- 
cise time of day established by the astronomical observa- 
tories. 



i 



% 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 



It may be doubted whether any language be rich 
enough to maintain more than one truly gi^eat poet, — 
and whether there be more than one period, and that very 
short, in the life of a language, when such a phenome- 
non as a great poet is possible. It may be reckoned 
one of the rarest pieces of good-luck that ever fell to 
the share of a race, that (as was true of Shakespeare) 
its most rhythmic genius, its acutest intellect, its pro- 
foundest imagination, and its healthiest understanding 
should have been combined in one man, and that he 
should have arrived at the full development of his 
powers at the moment when the material in which he 
was to work — that wonderful composite called English, 
the best result of the confusion of tongues — was in its 
ft'eshest perfection. The English-speaking nations should 
build a monument to the misguided enthusiasts of the 
Plain of Shinar ; for, as the mixture of many bloods 
seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern 
races, so has the mingling of divers speeches given them 
a language which is perhaps the noblest vehicle of poetic 
thought that ever existed. 

Had Shakespeare been born fifty years earlier, he 
would have been cramped by a book-language not yet 
flexible enough for the demands of rhythmic emotion, 
not yet sufficiently popularized for the natural and fa- 



152 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

miliar expression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in 
metaphysical phrase as to render possible that ideal 
representation of the great passions which is the aim 
and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and general 
consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to 
ease and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he 
been born fifty j^ears later, his ripened manhood would 
have found itself in an England absorbed and angry 
with the solution of political and religions problems, 
from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in 
that Elizabethan social system, ordered and planetary in 
functions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the 
Areopagite, where his contemplative eye could crowd it- 
self with various and brilliant picture, and whence his 
impartial brain — one lobe of which seems to have been 
Normanly refined and the other Saxonly sagacious — 
could draw its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its 
lessons of prudence and magnanimity. In estimating 
Shakespeare, it should never be forgotten, that, like 
Goethe, he was essentially observer and artist, and inca- 
pable of partisanship. The passions, actions, sentiments, 
whose character and results he delighted to watch and to 
reproduce, are those of man in society as it existed ; and 
it no more occurred to him to question the right of that 
society to exist than to criticise the divine ordination of 
the seasons. His business was with men as they were, 
not with man as he ought to be, — with the human soul 
as it is shaped or twisted into character by the complex 
experience of life, not in its abstract essence, as some- 
thing to be saved or lost. During the first half of the 
seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual interest 
was rather in the other world than in this, rather in the 
region of thought and principle and conscience than in 
actual life. It was a generation in which the poet was, 
and felt himself, out of place. Sir Thomas Browne, our 



II 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 153 

most imaginative mind since Shakespeare, found breath- 
ing-room, for a time, among the " altitudines ! " of 
religious speculation, but soon descended to occupy him- 
self with the exactitudes of science. Jeremy Taylor, 
who half a century earlier would have been Fletcher's 
rival, compels his clipped fancy to the conventual dis- 
cipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters 
his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved 
from making total shipwreck of his large-utteranced 
genius on the desolate Neman's Land of a religious epic 
only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues, with 
whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot con- 
ceal his sympathy. As purely poet, Shakespeare w^ould 
have come too late, had his lot fallen in that generation. 
In mind and temperament too exoteric for a mystic, his 
imagination could not have at once illustrated the influ- 
ence of his epoch and escaped from it, like that of 
Browne ; the equilibrium of his judgment, essential to 
him as an artist, but equally removed from propagan- 
dism, whether as enthusiast or logician, would have un- 
fitted him for the pulpit ; and his intellectual being was 
too sensitive to the wonder and beautv of outward life 
and Nature to have found satisfaction, as Milton's could, 
(and perhaps only by reason of his blindness,) in a world 
peopled by purely imaginary figures. We might fancy 
him becoming a great statesman, but he lacked the social 
position which could have opened that career to him. 
What we mean when we say Shakespeare, is something 
inconceivable either during the reign of Henry the 
Eighth, or the Commonwealth, and which would have 
been impossible after the Restoration. 

All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction 
at his nativity. The Reformation had passed the period 
of its vinous fermentation, and its clarified results re- 
mained as an element of intellectual impulse and exhila- 
7* 



154 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MOEE. ^ 

ration ; there were small signs yet of the acetous and 
putrefactive stages which were to follow in the victory 
and decline of Puritanism. Old forms of belief and 
worship still lingered, all the more touching to Fancy, 
perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted; the 
light of sceptic day was baffled by depths of forest where 
superstitious shapes still cowered, creatui'es of immemo- 
rial wonder, the raw material of Imagination, The in- 
vention of printing, without yet vulgarizing letters, had 
made the thought and history of the entire past contem- 
poraneous ; while a crowd of translators put every man 
who could read in inspiring contact with the select souls 
of all the centuries. A new world was thus opened to 
intellectual adventure at the very time when the keel of 
Columbus had turned the first daring furrow of discov- 
ery in that unmeasured ocean which still girt the known 
earth with a beckoning horizon of hope and conjecture, 
which was still fed by rivers that flowed down out of 
primeval silences, and which still washed the shores of 
Dreamland. Under a wise, cultivated, and firm-handed 
monarch also, the national feeling of England grew rap- 
idly more liomogeneous and intense, the rather as the 
womanhood of the sovereign stimulated a more chivakic 
loyalty, — while the new religion, of which she was the 
defender, helped to make England morally, as it was 
geographically, insular to the continent of Europe. 

If circumstances could ever make a great national 
poet, here were all the elements mingled at melting-heat 
in the alembic, and the lucky moment of projection was 
clearly come. If a great national poet could ever avail 
himself of circumstances, this was the occasion, — and, 
fortiuiately, Shakespeare was equal to it. Above aU, we 
may esteem it lucky that he found words ready to his 
use, original and imtarnished, — types of thought whose 
sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MOEE. 155 

reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now 
and then to find that even common sailors could not tell 
the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost 
Odyssean strain, and habitually used a diction that we 
should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost. 
Those who look upon language only as anatomists of its 
structure, or who regard it as only a means of conveying 
abstract truth from mind to mind, as if it were so many 
algebraic formulse, are apt to overlook the fact that its 
being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not 
mean what is technically called a living language, — the 
contrivance, hollow as a speaking-trumpet, by which 
breathing and moving bipeds, even now, sailing o'er life's 
solemn main, are enabled to hail each other and make 
known their mutual shortness of mental stores, — but 
one that is still hot from the hearts and brains of a 
people, not hardened yet, but moltenly duc'tile to new 
shapes of sharp and clear relief in the moulds of new 
thought. So soon as a language has become literary, so 
soon as there is a gap between the speech of books and 
that of life, the language becomes, so far as poetry is con- 
cerned, almost as dead as Latin, and (as in writing Latin 
verses) a mind in itself essentially original becomes in the 
use of such a medium of utterance unconsciously remi- 
niscential and reflective, lunar and not solar, in expression 
and even in thought. For words and thoughts have a 
much more intimate and genetic relation, one with the 
other, than most men have any notion of ; and it is one 
thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us, 
and another to be the puppets of an overmastering vo- 
cabulary. "Ye know not," says Ascham, "what hurt 
ye do to Learning, that care not for Words, but for 
Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and 
the Heart." Lingua Toscana in hocca liomana is the 
Italian proverb j and that of poets should be, The tongue 



156 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

of the i-)eox)le in the mouth of the scholar. I imply here 
no assent to the early theory, or, at any rate, practice, 
of Wordsworth, who confounded plebeian modes of 
thought with rustic forms of phrase, and then atoned 
for his blunder by absconding into a diction more Latin- 
ized than that of any poet of his century. 

Shakespeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the fa- 
ther and Norman by the mother, he was a representative 
Englishman. A country boy, he learned first the rough 
and ready English of his rustic mates, who knew how to 
make nice verbs and adjectives coiu-tesy to their needs. 
Going up to London, he acquired the lingua aulica pre- 
cisely at the happiest moment, just as it was becoming, 
in the strictest sense of the word, modern, — just as it 
had recruited itself, by fresh impressments from the 
Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to ex- 
press the new ideas of an enlarging intelligence which 
printing and translation were fast making cosmopolitan, 
— words which, in proportion to their novelty, and to 
the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not 
yet wholly mingled, must have been used with a more 
exact appreciation of their meaning.* It was in Lon- 
don, and chiefly by means of the stage, that a thorough 
amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly ele- 
ments of English was brought about. Already, Putten- 
ham, in his " Arte of English Poesy," declares that the 
practice of the capital and the country within sixty miles 
of it was the standard of correct diction, the jus et norma 
loquendi. Already Spenser had almost re-created English 
poetry, — and it is interesting to observe, that, scholar 
as he was, the archaic words which he was at first over- 
fond of introducing are often provincialisms of purely 
English original. Already Marlowe had brought the 

* As where Ben Jonson is able to say, — 
" Men may securely sin, but safely never." 



SHAKESPEAKE ONCE MORE. 157 

English unrhymed pentameter (which had hitherto justi- 
fied but half its name, by being always blank and never 
verse) to a perfection of melody, harmony, and variety 
which has never been surpassed. Shakespeare, then, 
found a language already to a certain extent established, 
but not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar mon- 
gers, — a versification harmonized, but which had not 
yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been set in the 
stocks by critics who deal judgment on refractory feet, 
that will dance to Orphean measures of which their 
judges are insensible. That the language was estab- 
lished is proved by its comparative uniformity as used 
by the dramatists, who wrote for mixed audiences, as 
well as by Ben Jonson's satire upon Marston's neolo- 
gisms ; that it at the same time admitted foreign words 
to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is 
in good measure equally true. What was of greater im- 
port, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high 
words and low; vulgar then meant simpl}^ what was 
common ; poetry had not been aliened from the people 
by the establishment of an Upper House of vocables, 
alone entitled to move in the stately ceremonials of 
verse, and privileged from arrest while they forever keep 
the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the 
sense. The hot concej^tion of the poet had no time to 
cool while he was debating the comparative respectabil- 
ity of this phrase or that ; but he snatched what word 
his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in mak- 
ing a king speak as his country nurse might have taught 
him.* It was Waller who first learned in France that 
to talk in rhyme alone comported with the state of vojr 

* " Viilgarem locutionem appellamus earn qua infantes adsuefiunt 
ab adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt: vel, quod 
brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus qiiam sine omni 
rerjula. nutricem imitantes, accepimus. Dantes, de Vulg. £loqmo, Lib. I. 
cap. i. 



158 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

alty. In the time of Shakespeare, the living tongue 
resembled that tree which Father Hue saw in Tartar}^, 
whose leaves were languaged, — and every hidden root 
of thought, every subtile st fibre of feeling, was mated by 
new shoots and leafage of expression, fed from those un- 
seen sources in the common earth of human nature. 

The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out 
the mystic word for anything attained to absolute mas- 
tery over that thing. The reverse of this is certainly 
true of poetic expression ; for he who is thoroughly pos- 
sessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea 
or image, becomes master of the word that shall most am- 
ply and fitly utter it. Heminge and Condell tell us, ac- 
cordingly, that there was scarce a blot in the manuscripts 
they received from Shakespeare ; and this is the natural 
corollary from the fact that such an imagination as his 
is as unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty of 
the phrase in which it embodied itself* We believe 
that Shakespeare, like all other great poets, instinctively 
used the dialect which he found current, and that his 
words are not more wrested from their ordinary mean- 
ing than followed necessarily from the unwonted weight 
of thought or stress of passion they were called on to 

* Gray, himself a painful con*ector, told Nicholls that " nothing was 
done so well as at the first concoction," — adding, as a reason, " We 
think in Avords." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakespeare had not 
blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense, — and cited in 
proof of it the verse, 

" Caesar did never wrong but with just cause." 

The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands, 
and Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in con- 
sequence of Jonson's criticism. This is very probable ; but we sus- 
pect that the pen that blotted them was in the hand of Master 
Heminge or his colleague. The moral confusion in the idea Avas sure- 
ly admirably characteristic of the general who had just accomplished 
a successful coup d'i'lat, the condemnation of which he would fancy 
that he read in the face of every honest man he met, and which he 
would therefore be forever indirectly palliating. 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 159 

support. He needed not to mask familiar thoughts in 
the weeds of unfamiliar phraseology ; for the life that 
was in his mind could transfuse the language of every 
day with an intelligent vivacity, that makes it seem 
lambent with fiery purpose, and at each new reading a 
new creation. He could say with Dante, that " no word 
had ever forced him to say what he would not, though 
he had forced many a word to say what it would not," 
— but only in the sense that the mighty magic of his 
imagination had conjured out of it its uttermost secret 
of power or pathos. When I say that Shakespeare used 
the current language of his day, I mean only that he 
habitually employed such language as was universally 
comprehensible, — that he was not run away with by the 
hobby of any theory as to the fitness of this or that com- 
ponent of English for expressing certain thoughts or feel- 
ings. That the artistic value of a choice and noble dic- 
tion was quite as well understood in his day as in ours 
is evident from the praises bestowed by his contempora- 
ries on Drayton, and by the epithet " well-languaged " 
applied to Daniel, whose poetic style is as modern as 
that of Tennyson ; but the endless absurdities about 
the comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French, 
vented by persons incapable of distinguishing one tongue 
from the other, were as yet unheard of. Hasty general- 
izers are apt to overlook the fact, that the Saxon was 
never, to any great extent, a literary language. Accord- 
ingly, it held its own very well in the names of com- 
mon things, but failed to answer the demands of com- 
plex ideas, derived from thera. The author of *'' Piers 
Ploughman " wrote for the people, — Chaucer for the 
court. We open at random and count the Latin * words 
in ten verses of the " Vision " and ten of the " Romaunt 

* We use the word Latin here to express words derived either me- 
diately or immediately from that language. 



160 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

of the Kose," (a translation from the French,) and find 
the proportion to be seven in the former and five in the 
latter. 

The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling 
and stiff in learning languages. He acquired only about 
as many British words as we have Indian ones, and I 
believe that more French and Latin was introduced 
through the pen and the eye than through the tongue 
and the ear. For obvious reasons, the question is one 
tliat must be decided by reference to prose-writers, and 
not poets ; and it is, we think, j^retty well settled that 
more words of Latin original were brought into the lan- 
guage in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in 
the whole period before or since, — and for the simple 
reason, that they were absolutely needful to express new 
modes and combinations of thought.* The language has 
gained immensely, by the infusion, in richness of syno- 
nyme and in the power of expressing nice shades of 
thought and feeling, but more than all in light-footed 
polysyllables that trip singing to the music of verse. 
There are certain cases, it is true, where the vulgar 
Saxon word is refined, and the refined Latin vulgar, in 
poetry, — as in sweat and perspiration ; but there are 
vastly more in which the Latin bears the bell. Perhaps 
there might be a question between the old English again- 
rising and resurrection ; but there can be no doubt that 
conscience is better than imvit^ and remorse than again- 
bite. Should we translate the title of Wordsworth's 
famous ode, " Intimations of Immortality," into " Hints 



* The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory (translat- 
ing from the French, 1470) is less Latinized than that of Bacon, 
Browne, Taylor, or ]\Iilton. The glossary to Spenser's Shepherd's Cal- 
endar (1579) explains woi'ds of Teiitonic and Romanic root in about 
equal proportions. The parallel but independent development of 
Scotch is not to be forgotten. 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 161 

of Deathlessness," it would hiss like an angry gander. 
If, instead of Shakespeare's 

" Age cannot wither her, 
Nor custom stale her infinite variety," 

we should say, " her boundless manifoldness," the senti- 
ment would sufter in exact proportion with the music. 
What homebred English could ape the high Roman 
fashion of such togated words as 

" The multitudinous sea incarnadine," — 

where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed 
soul of the speaker, and at the same time pictures the 
wallowing waste of ocean more vividly than the famous 
phrase of vEschylus does its ripjDling sunshine 1 Again, 
saihy is less poetical than mariner, as Campbell felt, 
when he wrote, 

" Ye manners of England," 

and Coleridge, when he chose 



rather than 



" It was an ancient mariner," 



" It was an elderly seaman " ; 



for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a 
certain remoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and 
it is essential not only that we feel at once the meaning 
of the words in themselves, but also their melodic mean- 
ing in relation to each other, and to the sympathetic 
variety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never 
be rehabilitated. We might say now a huxom lass, or 
that a chambermaid was huxom, but we could not use 
the term, as Milton did, in its original sense of howsome, 
— that is, lithe, gracefully henditig,* 

* I believe that for the last two centuries the Latin radicals of 
English have been more familiar and homelike to those who use them 
than the Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor Craik, 

K 



162 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

But the secret of force in writing lies not so much in 
the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in 
having something that you believe in to say, and making 
the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. It is when 
expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an 
unconscious necessity, that diction takes the place of 
warm and hearty speech. It is not safe to attribute 
special virtues (as Bosworth, for example, does to the 
Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poe- 
try. Because Lear's " oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and 
" the all-dreaded thunder-stone " in " Cymbeline " are 
so fine, we would not give up Milton's Virgilian " ful- 
mined over Greece," where the verb in English con- 
veys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but 
avoids that of riving and shattering. In the experiments 
made for casting the great bell for the Westminster 
Tower, it was found that the superstition which attrib- 

in his English of Shakespeare, derives head, through the German haupf, 
from the Lathi caput ! I trust that its genealogy is nobler, and that 
it is of kin with ccelmn tiieri, rather than with the Greek xe^aArj, if 
Suidas be right in tracing the origin of that to a word meaning vacuity. 
Mr. Craik suggests^ also, that quick and icicked may be etymologically 
identical, because he fancies a relationship between busy and the Ger- 
man bose, though xoicked is evidently the participial form of A. S. 
wacan, (German loeichen,) to bend, to yield, meaning one toho has given 
icay to temptation^ while quick seems as cleai-ly related to wegan, meaning 
to move, a different word, even if radically the same. In the " London 
Literary Gazette" for November 13, 1858, I find an extract from Miss 
Millington's " Heraldry in History, Poetry, and Romance," in which, 
speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales, — Dejxir Houmout ich 
diene, — she says : " The precise meaning of the fonner word [ZToMmowi] 
has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plainly the German 
Hochmuth, and the whole would read, Depar {Aus) Hochmuih ich diene, 
— " Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost is the Saxon meaning 
of the word knave, (A. S. cnava, German knabe,) that the name nawie, 
assumed by railway-laborers, has been transmogrified into navigator. 
I believe that more people could tell why the month of July was so 
called than could explain the origin of the names for our days of the 
v\'eek, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French words in Chau- 
cer that puzzle the modern reader. 



SHAKESPEAKE ONCE MORE. > 163 

uted the remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in 
certain old bells to the larger mixture of silver in their 
composition had no foundation in fact. It was the cun- 
ning proportion in which the ordinary metals were 
balanced against each other, the perfection of form, and 
the nice gradations of thickness, that wrought the mira- 
cle. And it is precisely so with the language of poetry. 
The genius of the poet will tell him what word to use 
(else what use in his being poet at all 1) ; and even then, 
unless the proportion and form, whether of parts or 
whole, be all that Art requires and the most sensitive 
taste finds satisfaction in, he will have failed to make 
what shall vibrate through all its parts with a silvery 
unison, — in other words, a poem. 

I think the component parts of English were in the 
latter years of Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned 
one to the other. Yet Bacon had no faith in his mother- 
tongue, translating the works on which his fame was to 
rest into what he called "the universal language," and 
affirming that " English would bankrupt all our books." 
He was deemed a master of it, nevertheless ; and it is 
curious that Ben Jonson applies to him in prose the 
same commendation which he gave Shakespeare in verse, 
saying, that he "performed that in our tongue which 
may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece 
or haughty Rome " ; and he adds this pregnant sentence : 
" In short, within his view and about his time were all 
the wits born that could honor a language or help study. 
Now things daily fall : wits grow downwards, eloquence 
grows backwards." Ben had good reason for what he 
said of the wits. Not to speak of science, of Galileo and 
Kepler, the sixteenth century was a spendthrift of literaiy 
genius. An attack of immortality in a family might 
have been looked for then as scarlet-fever would be now, 
Montaigne, Tasso, and Cervantes were born within four- 



164 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

teen years of each other ; and in England, while Sj^enser 
was still delving over the jA^ojjria quoa marihus, and 
Raleigh launching paper navies, Shakespeare was stretch- 
ing his baby hands for the moon, and the little Bacon, 
chewing on his coral, had discovered that impenetrability 
was one quality of matter. It almost takes one's breath 
away to think that " Hamlet " and the " Novum Orga- 
non " w^ere at the risk of teething and measles at the 
same time. But Ben was right also in thinking that 
eloquence had grown backwards. He lived long enough 
to see the language of verse become in a measure tradi- 
tionary and conventional. It was becoming so, partly 
from the necessary order of events, partly because the 
most natural and intense expression of feeling had been 
in so many ways satisfied and exhausted, — but chiefly 
because there was no man left to whom, as to Shakespeare, 
perfect conception gave perfection of phrase. Dante, 
among modern poets, his only rival in condensed force, 
says : " Optimis conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet ; 
sed optimse conceptiones non possunt esse nisi ubi scien- 
tia et ingenium est ; .... et sic non omnibus versifi- 
cantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine 
scientia et ingenio versificantur." * 

Shakespeare must have been quite as well aware of 
the provincialism of English as Bacon was ; but he knew 
that great poetry, being universal in its apj^eal to luiman 
nature, can make any language classic, and that the men 
whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any 
dialect to get at an original soul. He had as much con- 
fidence in his home-bred speech as Bacon had want of it, 
and exclaims : — 

* De Vulgari Eloqido, Lib. II. cap. i. ad Jlnem. I quote this 
treatise as Dante's, because the tlioughts seem manifestly his; though 
I beheve that in its present form it is an abridgment by some tran- 
scriber, who sometimes copies textu,ally, and sometimes substitutes his 
own language for that of the original. 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 165 

" Not marble nor the gilded monuments 
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme." 

He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, 
and of the great trust which he imposed upon his native 
tongue as the embodier and perpetuator of it. As he 
has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he would do so 
a fortiori in his plays, both for the purpose of immedi- 
ate effect on the stage and of future appreciation. Clear 
thinking makes clear wTiting, and he who has shown 
himself so eminently capable of it in one case is not to 
be supposed to abdicate intentionally in others. The 
difficult passages in the plays, then, are to be regarded 
either as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the natu- 
ral history of Imagination, whose study will enable us to 
arrive at a clearer theory and better understanding of it. 
While I believe that our language had two periods 
of culmination in poetic beauty, — one of nature, sim- 
plicity, and truth, in the ballads, which deal only with 
narrative and feeling, — another of Art, (or Nature as it 
is ideally reproduced through the imagination,) of state- 
ly amplitude, of passionate intensity and elevation, in 
Spenser and the greater dramatists, — and that Shake- 
speare made use of the latter as he foimd it, I by no 
means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or that 
any inferior man could have dipped the same words out 
of the great poet's inkstand. But he enriched it only 
by the natural expansion and exhilaration of which it 
was conscious, in yielding to the mastery of a genius 
that could turn and wind it like a fiery Pegasus, making 
it feel its life in every limb. He enriched it through 
that exquisite sense of music, (never approached but by 
Marlowe,) to wdiich it seemed eagerly obedient, as if 
every word said to him, 

" Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear," — 

as if every latent harmony revealed itself to him as the 



166 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 



1 



gold to Brahma, when he walked over the earth where 
it was hidden, crying, " Here am I, Lord ! do with me 
what thou wilt ! " That he used language with that in- 
timate possession of its meaning possible only to the 
most vivid thought is doubtless true ; but that he wan- 
tonly strained it from its ordinary sense, that he found 
it too poor for his necessities, and accordingly coined new 
phrases, or that, from haste or carelessness, he violated 
any of its received proprieties, I do not believe. I 
have said that it was fortunate for him that he came 
upon an age when om* language was at its best ; but it 
was fortunate also for us, because our costliest poetic 
phrase is put beyond reach of decay in the gleaming 
precipitate in which it united itself with his thought. 

That the propositions I have endeavored to establish 
have a direct bearing in various ways upon the qualifi- 
cations of whoever undertakes to edit the works of 
Shakespeare will, I think, be apparent to those who 
consider the matter. The hold which Shakespeare has 
acquired and maintained upon minds so many and so 
various, in so many vital respects utterly imsympathetic 
and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is one of 
the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of liter- 
ature. That he has had the most inadequate of editors, 
that, as his own Falstaff was the cause of the wit, so he 
has been the cause of the foolishness that was in other 
men, (as where Malone ventured to discourse upon 
his metres, and Dr. Johnson on his imagination,) must 
be apparent to every one, — and also that his genius 
and its manifestations are so various, that there is no 
commentator but has been able to illustrate him from 
his own peculiar point of view or from the results of his 
own favorite studies. But to show that he was a good 
common lawyer, that he understood the theory of colors, 
that he was an accurate botanist, a master of the science 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 167 

of medicine, especially in its relation to mental disease, 
a profound metaphysician, and of great experience and 
insight in politics, — all these, while they may very well 
form the staple of separate treatises, and prove, that, 
whatever the extent of his learning, the range and ac- 
curacy of his knowledge were beyond precedent or later 
parallel, are really outside the province of an editor. 

We doubt if posterity owe a greater debt to any two 
men living in 1623 than to the two obscure actors who 
in that year published the first folio edition of Shake- 
speare's plays. But for them, it is more than likely that 
such of his works as had remained to that time uu- 
printed would have been irrecoverably lost, and among 
them were " Julius Csesar," " The Tempest," and " Mac- 
beth." But are we to believe them when they assert 
that they present to us the plays which they reprinted 
from stolen and surreptitious copies " cured and perfect 
of their limbs," and those which are original in their 
edition " absolute in their numbers as he [Shakespeare] 
conceived them " 1 Alas, we have read too many theat- 
rical announcements, have been taught too often that 
the value of the promise was in an inverse ratio to the 
generosity of the exclamation-marks, too easily to be- 
lieve that ! Nay, we have seen numberless processions 
of healthy kine enter our native village unheralded save 
by the lusty shouts of drovers, while a wretched calf, 
cursed by stepdame Nature with two heads, was brought 
to us in a triumphal car, avant-couriered by a band of 
music as abnormal as itself, and announced as the great- 
est wonder of the age. If a double allowance of vitu- 
line brains deserve such honor, there are few commen- 
tators on Shakespeare that would have gone afoot, and 
the trumpets of Messieurs Heminge and Condell call 
up in our minds too many monstrous and deformed 
associations. 



168 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 



1 



What, then, is the vakie of the first folio as an au- 
thority 1 For eighteen of the phiys it is the only au- 
thority we have, and the onlj^ one also for four others in 
their comj^lete form. It is admitted that in several in- 
stances Heminge and Condell reprinted the earlier quarto 
impressions with a few changes, sometimes for the better 
and sometimes for the worse ; and it is most probable 
that copies of those editions (whether surreptitious or 
not) had taken the place of the original prompter's books, 
as being more convenient and legible. Even in these 
cases it is not safe to conclude that all or even any of 
the variations were made by the hand of Shakespeare 
himself And where the players printed from manu- 
script, is it likely to have been that of the author ] The 
probability is small that a writer so busy as Shakespeare 
must have been during his productive period should have 
copied out their parts for the actors himself, or that one 
so indifferent as he seems to have been to the imme- 
diate literary fortunes of his works should have given 
much care to the correction of copies, if made by others. 
The copies exclusively in the hands of Heminge and 
Condell were, it is manifest, in some cases, very imper- 
fect, whether we account for the fact by the burning of 
the Globe Theatre or by the necessary wear and tear of 
years, and (what is worthy of notice) they are plainly 
more defective in some parts than in others. " Measure 
for Measure " is an example of this, and we are not sat- 
isfied with being told that its ruggedness of verse is in- 
tentional, or that its obscurity is due to the fact that 
Shakespeare grew more elliptical in his style as he grew 
older. Profounder in thought he doubtless became ; 
though in a mind like his, we believe that this would 
imply only a more absolute supremacy in expression. 
But, from whatever original we suppose either the 
quartos or the first folio to have been printed, it is more 



SHAKESPEARE 0:^CE MORE. 169 

than questionable whether the proof-sheets had the ad- 
vantage of any revision other than that of the printing- 
office. Steevens was of opinion that authors in the 
time of Shakespeare never read their own proof-sheets ; 
and Mr. Spedding, in his recent edition of Bacon, 
comes independently to the same conclusion.* We 
may be very sure that Heminge and Condell did not, 
as vicars, take upon themselves a disagreeable task 
which the author would have been too careless to as- 
sume. 

Nevertheless, however strong a case may be made out 
against the Folio of 1623, whatever sins of omission we 
may lay to the charge of Heminge and Condell, or of 
commission to that of the printers, it remains the only 
text we have with any claims whatever to authenticity. 
It should be deferred to as authority in all cases where 
it does not make Shakespeare wTrite bad sense, uncouth 
metre, or false grammar, of all which we believe him to 
have been more supremely incapable than any other 
man who ever wrote English. Yet we w^ould not speak 
unkindly even of the blunders of the Folio. They have 
put bread into the mouth of many an honest editor, 
publisher, and printer for the last century and a half; 
and he wdio loves the comic side of human nature will 
find the serious notes of a variorum edition of Shake- 
speare as funny reading as the funny ones are serious. 

* Vol. IIT. p. 348, note. He gi'ounds his belief, not on the misprint- 
ing of Avoi'ds, but on the misplacing of whole paragi-aphs. We were 
struck with the same thing in the original edition of Chapman's " Bi- 
rou's Conspiracy and Tragedy." And yet, in comparing two copies of 
this edition, I have found corrections which only the author could have 
made. One of the misprints which 'Mr. Spedding notices affords both 
a hint and a warning to the conjectural emendator. In the edition of 
" The Advancement of Learning" printed in 1605 occurs the word clusi- 
nesse. In a later edition this was conjecturally changed to business ; but 
the occurrence of vertigine in the Latin translation enables Mi*. Sped- 
ding to print rightly, dizziness. 
8 



170 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

Sca,i'ce a commentator of them all, for more than a hun- 
dred years, but thought, as Alj^honso of Castile did of 
Creation, that, if he had only been at Shakespeare's el- 
bow, he could have given valuable advice ; scarce one 
who did not know off-hand that there was never a sea- 
port in Bohemia, — as if Shakespeare's world were one 
which Mercator could have, projected; scarce one but 
was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a sufficient key 
to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, 
of planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his 
metres ; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an J| 
ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have 
been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid 
the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the 
plummet ; scarce one but could speak with condescend- 
ing approval of that prodigious intelligence so utterly 
without congener that our baffled language must coin 
an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to 
say ShakesiDcrian of any other. And yet, in the midst 
of our imj)atience, we cannot help thinking also of how 
much healthy mental activity this one man has been the 
occasion, how much good he has indirectly done to so- 
ciety by withdrawing men to investigations and habits 
of thought that secluded them from baser attractions, 
for how many he has enlarged the circle of study and 
I'eflection ; since there is nothing in history or politics, 
nothing in art or science, nothing in physics or meta- 
physics, that is not sooner or later taxed for his illustra- 
tion. This is partially true of all great minds, open and 
sensitive to truth and beauty through any large arc of 
their circumference ; but it is true in an unexamjDled 
sense of Shakespeare, the vast round of whose balanced 
nature seems to have been equatorial, and to have had a 
southward exposure and a summer sympathy at every 
point, so that life, society, statecraft, serve us at last but 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 171 

as commentaries on him, and whatever we have gath- 
ered of thought, of knowledge, and of experience, con- 
fronted with his marvellous page, shrinks to a mere 
foot-note, the stepping-stone to some hitherto inaccessi- 
ble verse. We admire in Homer the blind placid miiTor 
of the world's young manhood, the bard who escapes 
from his misfortune in poems all memory, all life and 
bustle, adventure and picture ; we revere in Dante that 
compressed force of lifelong passion which could make a 
private experience cosmopolitan in its reach and ever- 
lasting in its significance ; we respect in Goethe the 
Aristotelian poet, wise by weariless obsen^ation, witty 
with intention, the stately Geheimerrath of a provincial 
court in the empire of Nature. As we study these, we 
seem in our limited way to penetrate into their con- 
sciousness and to measure and master their methods ; 
but with Shakespeare it is just the other way ; the more 
we have familiarized ourselves with the operations of 
our own consciousness, the more do we find, in reading 
him, that he has been beforehand with us, and that, 
while we have been vainly endeavoring to find the door 
of his being, he has searched every nook and cranny of 
our own. While other poets and dramatists embody 
isolated phases of character and work inward from the 
phenomenon to the special law which it illustrates, he 
seems in some strange way unitary with human nature 
itself, and his own soul to have been the law and life-giv- 
ing power of which his creations are only the phenomena. 
We justify or criticise the characters of other writers by 
our memory and experience, and pronounce them natural - 
or unnatural ; but he seems to have worked in the very- 
stuff of which memory and experience are made, and we 
recognize his truth to Nature by an innate and unac- 
quired sympathy, as if he alone possessed the secret of 
the " ideal form and universal mould," and embodied 



172 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

generic types rather than individuals. In this Cervantes 
alone has ajjproached him ; and Don Quixote and Sancho, 
like the men and women of Shakespeare, are the con- 
temporaries of every generation, because they are not 
products of an artificial and transitory society, but be- 
cause they are animated by the primeval and unchanging 
forces of that humanity which underlies and survives 
the forever-fickle creeds and ceremonials of the parochial 
corners which we who dwell in them sublimely call The 
World. 

That Shakespeare did not edit his own works must be 
attributed, w^e suspect, to his premature death. That 
he should not have intended it is inconceivable. Is 
there not something of self-consciousness in the break- 
ing of Prospero's wand and burying his book, ^^ — a sort 
of sad prophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of 
that man who, after such thaumaturgy, could go down 
to Stratford and live there for years, only collecting his 
dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on 
mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy 
quips with neighbors? His mind had entered into 
every phase of human life and thought, had embodied 
all of them in living creations ; — had he found all 
empty, and come at last to the belief that genius and 
its works were as phantasmagoric as the rest, and that 
fame was as idle as the rumor of the pit 1 However 
this may be, his works have come down to us in a con- 
dition of manifest and admitted corruption in some por- 
tions, while in others there is an obscurity which may 
be attributed either to an idiosj^ncratic use of words and 
condensation of phrase, to a deiDth of intuition for a 
proj)er coalescence with which ordinary language is in- 
adequate, to a concentration of passion in a focus that 
consumes the lighter links which bind together the 
clauses of a sentence or of a process of reasoning in 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 173 

common parlance, or to a sense of music which mingles 
music and meaning without essentially confounding 
them. We should demand for a perfect editor, then, 
first, a thorough giossological knowledge of the English 
contemporary with Shakespeare ; second, enough logical 
acuteness of mind and meta^^hysical training to enable 
him to follow recondite processes of thought ; third, 
such a conviction of the supremacy of his author as 
always to prefer his thought to any theory of his own ; 
fourth, a feeling for music, and so much knowledge of 
the practice of other poets as to understand that Shake- 
speare's versification differs from theirs as often in kind 
as in degree ; fifth, an acquaintance with the world as 
■well as with books ; and last, what is, perhaps, of more 
importance than all, so great a familiarity w^ith the 
working of the imaginative faculty in general, and of its 
peculiar operation in the mind of Shakespeare, as will 
prevent his thinking a passage dark with excess of light, 
and enable him to understand fully that the Gothic 
Shakespeare often superimposed upon the slender col- 
umn of a single word, that seems to twist under it, but 
does not, — like the quaint shafts in cloisters, — a 
weight of meaning which the modern architects of sen- 
tences would consider wholly unjustifiable by correct 
principle. 

Many years ago, while yet Fancy claimed that right 
in me which Fact has since, to my no small loss, so suc- 
cessfully disputed, I pleased myself with imagining the 
play of Hamlet j)ublished under some alias, and as the 
work of a new candidate in literature. Then I played, 
as the children say, that it came in regular course before 
some well-meaning doer of criticisms, who had never 
read the original, (no very wild assumption, as things go,) 
and endeavored to conceive the kind of way in which he 
would be likely to take it. I put myself in his place, 



174 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

and tried to write such a perfunctory notice as I thought 
would be likely, in filling his column, to satisfy his con- 
science. But it was a tour de force quite beyond my 
power to execute without grimace. I could not arrive 
at that artistic absorption in my own conception which 
would enable me to be natural, and found myself, like a 
bad actor, continually betraying my self-consciousness by 
my very endeavor to hide it under caricature. The path 
of Nature is indeed a narrow one, and it is only the im- 
mortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find 
themselves cramped therein. My result was a dead fail- 
ure, — satire instead of comedy. I could not shake off 
that strange accumulation which we call self, and report 
honestly what I saw and felt even to myself, much less 
to others. 

Yet I have often thought, that, unless we can so far 
free ourselves from our own prepossessions as to be capa- 
ble of bringing to a work of art some freshness of sensa- 
tion, and receiving from it in turn some new surprise of 
sympathy and admiration, — some shock even, it may 
be, of instinctive distaste and repulsion, — though we 
may praise or blame, weighing our 2^'*'os and cons in the 
nicest balances, sealed by proper authority, yet we shall 
not criticise in the highest sense. On the other hand, 
unless we admit certain principles as fixed beyond ques- 
tion, we shall be able to render no adequate judgment, 
but only to record our impressions, which may be valu- 
able or not, according to the greater or less ductility of 
the senses on which they are made. Charles Lamb, for 
example, came to the old English dramatists with the 
feeling of a discoverer. He brought with him an alert 
curiosity, and everything was delightful simply because 
it was strange. Like other early adventurers, he some- 
times mistook shining sand for gold ; but he had the 
gi'eat advantage of not feeling himself responsible for 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 175 

the manners of the inhabitants he found there, and not 
thinking it needful to make them square with any West- 
minster Catechism of aesthetics. Best of all, he did 
not feel compelled to compare them with the Greeks, 
about whom he knew little, and cared less. He took 
them as he found them, described them in a few pregnant 
sentences, and displayed his specimens of their growth 
and manufacture. When he arrived at the dramatists 
of the Restoration, so far from being shocked, he was 
charmed with their pretty and unmoral ways ; and Y>'hat 
he says of them reminds us of blunt Captain Dampier, 
who, in his account of the island of Timor, remarks, as 
a matter of no consequence, that the natives "take as 
many wives as they can maintain, and as for religion, 
they have none." 

Lamb had the great advantage of seeing the elder 
dramatists as they were ; it did not lie within his prov- 
ince to point out what they were not. Himself a frag- 
mentary writer, he had more sympathy with imagination 
where it gathers into the intense focus of passionate 
phrase than with that higher form of it, where it is the 
faculty that shapes, gives unity of design and balanced 
gravitation of parts. And yet it is only this higher form 
of it which can unimpeachably assure to any work the 
dignity and permanence of a classic ; for it results in 
that exquisite something called Style, which, like the 
grace of perfect breeding, everywhere pervasive and no- 
where emphatic, makes itself felt by the skill with which 
it effaces itself, and masters us at last with a sense of in- 
definable completeness. On a lower plane we may detect 
it in the structure of a sentence, in the limpid expression 
that implies sincerity of thought ; but it is only where it 
combines and organizes, where it eludes observation in 
particulars to give the rarer delight of perfection as a 
whole, that it belongs to art. Then it is truly ideal, the 



176 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

forma mentis ct^terna, not as a passive mould into wliich 
the thought is poured, but as the conceptive energy 
which finds all material plastic to its preconceived de- 
sign. Mere vividness of expression, such as makes quot- 
able passages, comes of the complete surrender of self to 
the impression, whether spiritual or sensual, of the mo- 
ment. It is a quality, perhaps, in which the young poet 
is richer than the mature, his very inexperience making 
him more venturesome in those leaps of language that 
startle us with their rashness only to bewitch us the 
more with the happy ease of their accomplishment. For 
this there are no existing laws of rhetoric, for it is from 
such felicities that the rhetoricians deduce and codify 
their statutes. It is something which cannot be im- 
proved upon or cultivated, for it is immediate and intui- 
tive. But this power of expression is subsidiary, and 
goes only a little way toward the making of a great poet. 
Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and 
not a quality ; it looks before and after, it gives the form 
that makes all the parts work together harmoniously to- 
ward a given end, its seat is in the higher reason, and it 
is efficient only as a servant of the will. Imagination, 
as it is too often misunderstood, is mere fantasy, the 
image-making power, common to all who have the gift 
of dreams, or who can afford to buy it in a vulgar drug 
as De Quincey bought it. 

The true poetic imagination is of one quality, whether 
it be ancient or modern, and equally subject to those 
laws of grace, of proportion, of design, in whose free 
service, and in that alone, it can become art. Those 
laws are something which do not 

" Alter when they alteration find, 
And bend with the' remover to remove." 

And they are more clearly to be deduced from the emi- 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 177 

ncnt examples of Greek literature than from any other 
source. It is the advantage of this select company of 
ancients that their works are defecated of all turbid 
mixture of contemporaneousness, and have become to us 
pure literature, our judgment and enjoyment of which 
cannot be vulgarized by any prejudices of time or place. 
This is why the study of them is fitly called a liberal 
education, because it emancipates the mind from every 
narrow provincialism whether of egoism or tradition, and 
is the apprenticeship that every one must serve before 
becoming a free brother of the guild which passes the 
torch of life from age to age. There would be no dis- 
pute about the advantages of that Greek culture which 
Schiller advocated with such generous eloquence, if the 
great authors of antiquity had not been degraded from 
teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar, and made 
the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection, instead 
of companions for whose society the mind must put on 
her highest mood. The discouraged j^outh too naturally 
transfers the epithet of dead from the languages to the 
authors that wrote in them. What concern have we 
with the shades of dialect in Homer or Theocritus, pro- 
vided they speak the spiritual lingua franca that abol- 
ishes all alienage of race, and makes whatever shore of 
time we land on hospitable and homelike *? There is 
much that is deciduous in books, but all that gives them 
a title to rank as literature in the highest sense is peren- 
nial. Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another 
blood or tongue, but of human nature ; their truth is 
not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation ; 
and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of 
each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser 
with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one 
secret after another as his own life and experience give 
him the key, but on no other condition. Their mean- 
8* L 



178 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MOEE. 

ing is absolute, not conditional ; it is a property of theirs, 
quite irrespective of manners or creed ; for the highest 
culture, the development of the individual by observa- 
tion, reflection, and study, leads to one result, whether 
in Athens or in London. The more we know of ancient 
literature, the more we are struck with its modernness, 
just as the more we study the maturer dramas of 
Shakespeare, the more we feel his nearness in certain 
primary qualities to the antique and classical. Yet 
even in saying this, I tacitly make the admission that it 
is the Greeks who must fm-nish us with our standard of 
comparison. Their stamp is upon all the allowed meas- 
ures and weights of aesthetic criticism. Nor does a con- 
sciousness of this, nor a constant reference to it, in any 
sense reduce us to the mere copying of a bygone excel- 
lence ; for it is the test of excellence in any department 
of art, that it can never be bygone, and it is not mere 
difference from antique models, but the way in which 
that difference is shown, the direction it takes, that we 
are to consider in our judgment of a modern work. The 
model is not there to be copied merely, but that the 
study of it may lead us insensibly to the same processes 
of thought by which its purity of outline and harmony 
of parts were attained, and enable us to feel that strength 
is consistent with repose, that multiplicity is not abun- 
dance, that grace is but a more refined form of power, 
and that a thought is none the less profound that the 
limpidity of its expression allows us to measure it at a 
glance. To be possessed with this conviction gives us 
at least a determinate point of view, and enables us to 
appeal a case of taste to a court of final judicature, 
whose decisions are guided by immutable principles. 
When wc hear of certain productions, that they are fee- 
ble in design, but masterl}^ in parts, that they are inco- 
herent, to be sure, but have great merits of style, we 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 179 

know that it cannot be true ; for in the highest exam- 
ples we have, the master is revealed by his plan, by his 
power of making all accessories, each in its due relation, 
subordinate to it, and that to limit style to the rounding 
of a period or a distich is wholly to misapprehend its 
truest and highest function. Donne is full of salient 
verses that would take the rudest March winds of criti- \ 

cism with their beauty, of thoughts that first tease us 
like charades and then delight us with the felicity of 
their solution; but these have not saved him. He is 
exiled to the limbo of the formless and the fragmentary. 
To take a more recent instance, — Wordsworth had, in 
some respects, a deeper insight, and a more adequate 
utterance of it, than any man of his generation. But 
it was a piece-meal insight and utterance ; his imagina- 
tion was feminine, not mascidine, receptive, and not crea- 
tive. His longer poems are Egyptian sand-wastes, with 
here and there an oasis of exquisite greenery, a grand 
image, Sphinx-like, half buried in drifting commonplaces, 
or the solitary Pompey's Pillar of some towering thought. 
But what is the fate of a poet who owns the quarry, but 
cannot build the poem 1 Ere the century is out he will 
be nine parts dead, and immortal only in that tenth part 
of him which is included in a thin volume of "beauties." . 
Already Moxon has felt the need of^ extracting this es- 
sential oil of him ; and his memory will be kept alive, 
if at all, by the precious material rather than the work- 
manship of the vase that contains his heart. And what 
shall we forebode of so many modern poems, full of 
splendid passages, beginning everywhere and leading no- 
where, reminding us of nothing so much as the amateur 
architect who planned his own house, and forgot the 
staircase that should connect one floor with another, 
putting it as an afterthought on the outside 1 

Lichtenberg says somewhere, that it was the advan- 



180 SHAKESPEARE OXCE MORE. 

tage of the ancients to write before the great art of writ- 
ing ill had been invented ; and Shakespeare may be said 
to have had the good luck of coming after Spenser (to 
whom the debt of English poetry is incalculable) had 
reinvented the art of writing well. But Shakesj^eare 
arrived at a mastery in this respect which sets him above 
all other poets. He is not only superior in degree, but 
he is also different in kind. In that less purely artistic 
sphere of st^de which concerns the matter rather than 
the form his charm is often unspeakable. How perfect 
his style is may be judged from the fact that it never 
curdles into mannerism, and thus absolutely eludes imi- 
tation. Though here, if anywhere, the style is the man, 
■yet it is noticeable only, like the images of Brutus, by 
its absence, so thoroughly is he absorbed in his work, 
while he fuses thought and word indissolubly together, 
till all the particles cohere by the best virtue of each. 
With perfect truth he has said of himself that he writes 

" All one, evei- the same, 
Putting invention in a noted weed, 
That every word doth almost tell his name." 

And yet who has so succeeded in imitating him as to re- 
mind us of him by even so much as the gait of a single 
verse 1 * Those magnificent crystallizations of feeling 
and phrase, basaltic masses, molten and interfused by the 
primal fires of passion, are not to be reproduced by the 
slow experiments of the laboratory striving to parody 
creation with artifice. Mr. Matthew Arnold seems to think 
that Shakespeare has damaged English poetr}^ I wish 
he had ! It is true he lifted Dryden above himself in "All 

* " At first sight, Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists 
seem to -wTite in styles much alike ; nothing so easy as to fall into that 
of ^lassinger and tlie others; wliilst no one has ever yet produced one 
scene conceived and expressed in the Shakespearian idiom. I suppose 
it is because Shakespeare is universal, and, in fact, has no manner.''^ — 
Cohridge's Tabktalk, 214. 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 181 

for Love " ; but it was Dryden who said of him, by in- 
stinctive conviction rather than judgment, that within 
his magic circle none dared tread but he. Is he to blame 
for the extravagances of modern diction, which are but 
the reaction of the brazen age against the degeneracy of 
art into artifice, that has characterized the silver period 
in every literature 1 We see in them only the futile 
effort of misguided persons to torture out of language 
the secret of that inspiration which should be in them- 
selves. We do not find the extravagances in Shake- 
speare himself We never saw a line in any modern poet 
that reminded us of him, and will venture to assert that 
it is only poets of the second class that find successful 
imitators. And the reason seems to us a very plain one. 
The genius of the great poet seeks repose in the expres- 
sion of itself, and finds it at last in style, which is the 
establishment of a perfect mutual understanding be- 
tween the worker and his material.* The secondary in- 
tellect, on the other hand, seeks for excitement in ex- 
pression, and stimulates itself into mannerism, which is 
the wilful obtrusion of self, as style is its unconscious 
abnegation. No poet of the first class has ever left a 
school, because his imagination is incommunicable ; while, 
just as surely as the thermometer tells of the neighbor- 
hood of an iceberg, you may detect the presence of a 
genius of the second class in any generation by the in- 
fluence of his mannerism, for that, being an artificial 
thing, is capable of reproduction. Dante, Shakespeare, 
Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their 
expression ; while Milton, Sterne, and Wordsworth left 
behind them whole regiments uniformed with all their 
external characteristics. We do not mean that great 

* Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb, 
because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless sweep a grace of 
curve which it refused to the utmost pains of others. 



182 SHAKESPEARE OXCE MORE. 

poetic geniuses may not have influenced thought, (though 
we think it would be difficult to show how Shakespeare 
had done so, directly and wilfully,) but that they have 
not infected contemporaries or followers with m'annerism. 
The quality in him which makes him at once so thoroughly 
English and so thoroughly cosmopolitan is that aeration 
of the understanding by the imagination which he has 
in common with all the greater poets, and which is the 
privilege of genius. The modern school, which mistakes 
violence for intensity, seems to catch its breath when it 
finds itself on the verge of natm-al expression, and to 
say to itself, " Good heavens ! I had almost forgotten I 
was inspired ! " But of Shakespeare we do not even sus- 
pect that he ever remembered it. He does not always 
speak in that intense way that flames up in Lear and 
Macbeth through the rifts of a soil volcanic with passion. 
He allows us here and there the repose of a common- 
place character, the consoling distraction of a humorous 
one. He knows how to be equable and gi'and without 
effort, so that we forget the altitude of thought to which 
he has led us, because the slowly receding slope of a 
mountain stretching downward by ample gradations gives 
a less startling impression of height than to look over 
the edge of a ravine that makes but a wrinkle in its 
flank. 

Shakespeare has been sometimes taxed with the bar- 
barism of profuseness and exaggeration. But this is to 
measure him by a Sophoclean scale. The simplicity of 
the antique tragedy is by no means that of expression, 
but is of form merely. In the utterance of great pas- 
sions, something must be indulged to the extravagance 
of Nature ; the subdued tones to which pathos and sen- 
timent are limited cannot express a tempest of the soul. 
The range between the piteous " no more but so," in 
which Ophelia compresses the heart-break whose com- 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 183 

pression was to make her mad, and that subhme appeal 
of Lear to the elements of Nature, only to be matched, 
if matched at all, in the '' Prometheus," is a wide one, 
and Shakespeare is as truly simple in the one as in the 
other. The simplicity of poetry is not that of j)rose, 
nor its clearness that of ready apprehension merely. 
To a subtile sense, a sense heightened by sympathy, 
those sudden fervors of phrase, gone ere one can say it 
lightens, that show us Macbeth groping among the com- 
plexities of thought in his conscience-clouded mind, and 
reveal the intricacy rather than enlighten it, while they 
leave the eye darkened to the literal meaning of the 
words, yet make their logical sequence, the grandeur of 
the conception, and its truth to Nature clearer than 
sober daylight could. There is an obscurity of mist 
rising from the undrained shallows of the mind, and 
there is the darkness of thunder-cloud gathering its 
electric masses with passionate intensity from the clear 
element of the imagination, not at random or wilfully, 
but by the natural processes of the creative faculty, to 
brood those flashes of expression that transcend rhet- 
oric, 4md are only to be apprehended by the poetic in- 
stinct. 

In that secondary office of imagination, where it 
serves the artist, not as the reason that shapes, but as 
the interpreter of his conceptions into words, there is a 
distinction to be noticed between the higher and lower 
mode in which it performs its function. It may be 
either creative or pictorial, may body forth the thought 
or merely image it forth. With Shakespeare, for exam- 
ple, imagination seems immanent in his very conscious- 
ness ; with Milton, in his memory. In the one it sends, 
as if without knowing it, a fiery life into the verse, 

" Sei die Braut das Wort, 
Brautigam der Geist " ; 



184 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

in the other it elaborates a certain pomp and elevation. 
Accordingly, the bias of the former is toward over-inten- 
sity, of the latter toward over-difFuseness. Shakespeare's 
temptation is to push a willing metaphor bej^ond its 
strength, to make a passion over-inform its tenement of 
words; Milton cannot resist running a simile on into a 
fugue. One always fancies Shakespeare in his best verses, 
and Milton ^ the key-board of his organ. Shakespeare's 
language is no longer the mere vehicle of thought, it has 
become part of it, its very flesh and blood. The pleasure 
it gives us is unmixed, direct, like that from the smell 
of a flower or the flavor of a fruit. Milton sets every- 
where his little pitfalls of bookish association for the 
memory. I know that Milton's manner is very grand. 
It is slow, it is stately, moving as in triumphal proces- 
sion, with music, with historic banners, with spoils from 
every time and every region, and captive epithets, like 
hu<>;e Sicambrians, thrust their broad shoulders between 
us and the thought whose pomp they decorate. But it 
is manner, nevertheless, as is proved by the ease with 
which it is parodied, by the danger it is in of degenerat- 
ing into mannerism whenever it forgets itself. Fancy a 
parody of Shakespeare, — I do not mean of his words, 
but of his lone, for that is what distinguishes the master. 
You might as well try it with the Venus of Melos. In 
Shakespeare it is always the higher thing, the thought, 
the fancy, that is pre-eminent ; it is Csesar that draws 
all eyes, and not the chariot in which he rides, or the 
throng which is but the reverberation of his supremac}^ 
If not, how explain the charm with which he dominates 
in all tongues, even under the disenchantment of trans- 
lation % Among the most alien races he is as solidly at 
home as a mountain seen from different sides by many 
lands, itself superbly solitary, yet the companion of all 
thoughts and domesticated in all imaginations. 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 185 

In description Shakespeare is especially great, and in 
that instinct which gives the peculiar quality of any ob- 
ject of contemplation in a single happy word that colors 
the impression on the sense with the mood of the mind. 
Most descriptive poets seem to think that a hogshead of 
water caught at the spout will give us a livelier notion 
of a thunder-shower than the sullen muttering of the 
first big drops upon the roof. They forget that it is by 
suggestion, not cumulation, that profound impressions 
are made upon the imagination. Milton's parsimony (so 
rare in him) makes the success of his 

" Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
Wept at completion of the mortal sin." 

Shakespeare understood perfectly the charm of indi- 
rectness, of making his rear'ers seem to discover for 
themselves what he means to show them. If he wishes 
to tell that the leaves of the w^low are gray on the 
under side, he does not make it a mere fact of observa- 
tion by bluntly saying so, but makes it picturesquely 
reveal itself to us as it might in Nature : — 

" There is a willow grows athwart the flood, 
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream." 

Where he goes to the landscape for a comparison, he 
does not ransack wood and field for specialties, as if he 
were gathering simples, but takes one image, obvious, 
familiar, and makes it new to us either by sympathy or 
contrast with his own immediate feeling. He alwaj^s 
looked upon Nature with the eyes of the mind. Thus 
he can make the melancholy of autumn or the gladness 
of spring alike pathetic : — 

" That time of year thou mayst in me behold. 
When yellow leaves, or few, or none, do hang 
Upon those boughs that shake against the cold, 
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." 

Or aojain : — 



186 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

" From thee have I been absent in the spring, 
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, 
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, 
That heavy Saturn leaped and laughed with him." 

But as dramatic poet, Shakespeare goes even beyond 
this, entering so perfectly into the consciousness of the 
characters he himself has created, that he sees every- 
thing through their peculiar mood, and makes every 
epithet, as if unconsciously, echo and re-echo it. The- 
seus asks Hermia, — 

" Can you endure the livery of a nun, 
For aye to be in shady cloister mewed, 
To live a barren sister all your life, 
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon? " 

When Romeo must leave Juliet, the private pang of the 

lovers becomes a property of Nature herself, and 

" Envious streaks 
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east." 

But even more striking is the following instance from 

Macbeth : — 

" The raven himself is hoarse 
That croaks the fatal enterance of Duncan 
Under your battlements." 

Here Shakespeare, with his wonted tact, makes use of a 
vulgar superstition, of a type in which mortal presenti- 
ment is already embodied, to make a common ground on 
vv'hich the hearer and Lady Macbeth may meet. After 
this prelude we are prepared to be possessed by her 
emotion more fully, to feel in her ears the dull tramp of 
the blood that seems to make the raven's croak yet 
hoarser than it is, and to betray the stealthy advance 
of the mind to its fell purpose. For Lady Macbeth 
hears not so much the voice of the bodeful bird as of 
her own premeditated murder, and we are thus made 
her shuddering accomplices before the fact. Every 
image receives the color of the mind, every word throbs 
with the pulse of one controlling passion. The epithet 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MOEE. 187 

fatal makes us feel the implacable resolve of the speaker, 
and shows us that she is tampering with her conscience 
by putting off the crime upon the prophecy of the Weird 
Sisters to which she alludes. In the word hattlements, 
too, not only is the fancy led up to the perch of the 
raven, but a hostile image takes the place of a hospita- 
ble ; for men commonly speak of receiving a guest under 
their roof or within their doors. That this is not over- 
ingenuity, seeing what is not to be seen, nor meant to be 
seen, is clear to me from what follows. When Duncan 
and Banquo arrive at the castle, their fancies, free from 
all suggestion of evil, call up only gracious and amiable 
images. The raven was but the fantastical creation of 
Lady Macbeth's over-wrought brain. 

" This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air 
Nimbly and sweetly doth commend itself 
Unto our gentle senses. 

This guest of summer, 
The temple-hauniing martlet, doth approve 
By his loved mansionry that the heaven's breath 
Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze. 
Buttress, or coigne of vantage, but this bird 
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle." 

The contrast here cannot but be as intentional as it is 
marked. Every image is one of welcome, security, and 
confidence. The summer, one may well fancy, would be 
a very different hostess from her whom we have just seen 
expecting them. And why temple-haunting, unless because 
it suggests sanctuary ? immaginativa, che si ne rubi 
delle cose difuor, how infinitely more precious are the in- 
ward ones thou givest in return ! If all this be accident, 
it is at least one of those accidents of which only this man 
was ever capable. I divine something like it now and 
then in ^schylus, through the mists of a language which 
wiU not let me be sure of what I see, but nowhere else. 
Shakespeare, it is true, had, as I have said, as re- 
spects English, the privilege which only first-comers en- 



188 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

joy. The language was still fresh from those sources at 
too great a distance from which it becomes fit only for 
the service of jDrose. Wherever he dipped, it came up 
clear and sparkling, undefiled as yet by the drainage of 
literary factories, or of those dye-houses where the ma- 
chine-woven fabrics of sham culture are colored up to 
the last desperate style of sham sentifhent. Those who 
criticise his diction as sometimes extravagant should re- 
member that in poetry language is something more than 
merely the vehicle of thought, that it is meant to con- 
vey the sentiment as much as the sense, and that, if 
there is a beauty of use, there is often a higher use of 
beauty. 

What kind of culture Shakespeare had is uncertain ; 
how much he had is disputed ; that he had as much 
as he wanted, and of whatever kind he wanted, must 
be clear to whoever considers the question. Dr. Farmer 
has proved, in his entertaining essay, that he got every- 
thing at second-hand from translations, and that, where 
his translator blundered, he loyally blundered too. 
But Goethe, the man of widest acquirement in modern 
times, did precisely the same thing. In his charac- 
ter of poet he set as little store by useless learning 
as Shakespeare did. He learned to write hexameters, 
not from Homer, but from Voss, and Voss found them 
faulty ; yet somehow Hey-mann unci Dorothea is more 
readable than Luise. So far as all the classicism then 
attainable was concerned, Shakespeare got it as cheap as 
Goethe did, who always bought it ready-made. For 
such purposes of mere aesthetic nourishment Goethe al- 
ways milked other minds, — if minds those ruminators 
and digesters of antiquity into asses' milk may be called. 
There were plenty of professors who were forever assidu- 
ously browsing in vales of Enna and on Pentelican slopes 
among the vestiges of antiquity, slowly secreting lacteous 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 189 

facts, and not one of them would have raised his head 
from that exquisite pasturage, though Pan had made 
music through his pipe of reeds. Did Goethe wish to 
work up a Greek theme *? He drove out Herr Bottiger, 
for example, among that fodder delicious to him for its 
very dryness, that sapless Arcadia of scholiasts, let him 
graze, ruminate, aiid go through all other needful pro- 
cesses of the antiquarian organism, then got him quietly 
into a corner and milked him. The product, after stand- 
ing long enough, mantled over with the rich Goethean 
cream, from which a but^r could be churned, if not j)re- 
cisely classic, quite as good as the ancients could have 
made out of the same material. But who has ever read 
the Achilleis, correct in all «« essential particulars as it 
probably is 1 

It is impossible to conceive that a man, wdio, in other 
respects, made such booty of the world around him, 
whose observation of manners was so minute, and whose 
insight into character and motives, as if he had been one 
of God's spies, was so unerring that we accept it without 
question, as we do Nature herself, and find it more con- 
soling to explain his confessedly immense superiority by 
attributing it to a happy instinct rather than to the con- 
scientious perfecting of exceptional powers till practice 
made them seem to work independently of the will 
wdiich still directed them, — it is impossible that such a 
man should not also have profited by the converse of 
the cultivated and quick-witted men in whose familiar 
society he lived, that he should not have over and over 
again discussed points of criticism and art with them, 
that he should not have had his curiosity, so alive to 
everything else, excited about those ancients whom 
university men then, no do\ibt, as now, extolled without 
too much knowledge of what they really were, that he 
should not have heard too much rather than too little 



190 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

of Aristotle's Poetics, Quinctilian's Rhetoric, Horace's Art 

of Poetry, and the Unities, especially from Ben Jonson, 

— in short, that he who speaks of himself as 

" Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, 
With what he most enjoyed contented least," 

and who meditated so profoundly on every other topic 
of human concern, should never have turned his thought 
to the principles of that art which was both the delight 
and business of his life, the bread-winner alike for soul 
and body. Was there no harvest of the ear for him 
whose eye had stocked its garners so full as wellnigh to 
forestall all after-comers? Did he who could so counsel 
the practisers of an art in which he never arrived at 
eminence, as in Hamlet's advice to the players, never 
take counsel with himself about that other art in which 
the instinct of the crowd, no less than the judgment of 
his rivals, awarded him an easy pre-eminence 1 If he 
had little Latin and less Greek, might he not have had 
enough of both for every practical purpose on this side 
pedantry? The most extraordinary, one might almost 
say contradictory, attainments have been ascribed to 
him, and yet he has been supposed incapable of what 
was within easy reach of every boy at AVestminster 
School. There is a knowledge that comes of sympathy 
as living and genetic as that which comes of mere learn- 
ing is sapless and unprocreant, and for this no profound 
study of the languages is needed. 

If Shakespeare did not know the ancients, I think 
they were at least as unlucky in not knowing him. But 
is it incredible that he may have laid hold of an edition 
of the Greek tragedians, Graece et Latine, and then, with 
such poor wits as he was master of, contrived to worry 
some considerable meaning out of them 1 There are at 
least one or two coincidences which, whether accidental 
or not, are curious, and which I do not remember to 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 191 

have seen noticed. In the Electra of Sophocles, which 
is almost identical in its leading motive with Hamlet, the 
Chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Ores- 
tes in the same commonplace way which Hamlet's uncle 
tries with him. 

QviiTox) TTe(f>VKa^ naTp6<;, 'HAe'/crpa, (ftpovei ' 
©VTjTO? 5' 'Ope'aTTj? • wcrre ixr) \iav areve, 
Uacriv yap riij.lv tovt b<j>e(.\eTaL naOelf. 

" Your father lost a father; 
That father lost, lost his 

But to pers^ver 
In obstinate condolement is a course 

Of impious stubbornness 

'T is common; all that live must die." 

Shakespeare expatiates somewhat more largely, but the 
sentiment in both cases is almost verbally identical. 
The resemblance is probably a chance one, for common- 
place and consolation were always twin sisters, whom 
always to escape is given to no man ; but it is neverthe- 
less curious. ■ Here is another, from the CEdipus Colo- 
neiis : — 

Tots TOi SiKat'ot? \oi /3paxvs viKiy jxeyav, 

" Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just." 
Hamlet's "prophetic soul" may be matched with the 
irponavTis Ovixos of Peleus, (EurijD. Androm. 1075,) and 
his " sea of troubles," with the kukwv neXayos of Theseus 
in the Hippolytus, or of the Chorus in the Hercules 
Fureiis. And, for manner and tone, compare the 
speeches of Pheres in the Alcestis, and Jocasta in the 
Fhoenissae, with those of Claudio in Measure for Measure, 
and Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. 

The Greek dramatists were somewhat fond of a trick 
of words in which there is a reduplication of sense as well 
as of assonance, as in the Electra : — 

"AXexxpa yrfpivKOvcav awfiivaia. re. 

So Shakespeare : — 

" Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled"; 



192 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

and Milton after him, or, more likely, after the Greek : — • 

" Uurespited, unpitied, unreprieved." * 

I mention these trifles, in passing, because they have 
interested me, and therefore may interest others. I lay 
no stress upon them, for, if once the conductors of Shake- 
speare's intelligence had been put in connection with 
those Attic brains, he would have reproduced their mes- 
sage in a form of his own. They would have inspired, 
and not enslaved him. His resemblance to them is that 
of consanguinity, more striking in expression than in 
mere resemblance of feature. The likeness between the 
Clytemnestra — yvuaiKos dvdpo^ovkov iXni^ou Keap — of 
^schylus and the Lady Macbeth of Shakespeare was too 
remarkable to have escaped notice. That between the 
two poets in their choice of epithets is as great, though 
more difficult of proof. Yet I think an attentive student 
of Shakespeare cannot fail to be reminded of something 
familiar to him in such phrases as "flame-eyed fire," 
" flax-winged ships," " star-neighboring peaks," the rock 
Salmydessus, 

" Rude jaw of the sea, 

Harsh hostess of the seaman, step-mother 

Of ships," 

and the beacon with its " sj^eakinc/ eye of fire." Surely 
there is more than a verbal, there is a genuine, similar- 
ity between the dpr}pi6fxov yiXaapa and "the uiniumbered 
beach" and "multitudinous sea." tEscIivIus, it seems 
to me, is willing, just as Shakespeare is, to risk the pros- 
perity of a verse upon a lucky throw of words, which 
may come up the sices of hardy metaphor or tLe ambs- 

* The best instance I remember is in the Frogs^ where Bacchus 
pleads his inexperience at the oar, and says he is 

O7reip09, a6a\6.TT(x)TOS, aeraAa/aiVtof, 

which might be rendered, 

Unskilled, unsea-soued, and un-Salamised. 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 193 

ace of conceit. There is such a difference between far- 
reaching and far-fetching ! Poetry, to be sure, is always 
that daring one step beyond, which brings the right man 
to fortune, but leaves the "wrong one in the ditch, and 
its law is. Be bold once and again, yet be not over-bold. 
It is true, also, that masters of language are a little apt 
to play with it. But whatever fault may be found with 
Shakespeare in this respect will touch a tender spot in 
u^Eschylus also. Does he sometimes overload a word, so 
that the language not merely, as Dryden says, bends 
under him, but fairly gives way, and lets the reader's 
mind down with the shock as of a false step in taste ? 
He has nothing worse than neXayos avOovv veKpoh. A 
criticism, shallow in human nature, however deep in Camp- 
bell's Rhetoric, has blamed him for making persons, under 
great excitement of sorrow, or whatever other emotion, 
parenthesize some trifling play ujjon words in the very 
height of their passion. Those who make such criticisms 
have either never felt a passion or seen one in action, or 
else they forget the exaltation of sensibility during such 
crises, so that the attention, wdiether of the senses or the 
mind, is arrested for the moment by what would be over- 
looked in ordinary moods. The more forceful the cur- 
rent, the more sharp the ripple from any alien substance 
interposed. A passion that looks forward, like revenge 
or lust or gi^eed, goes right to its end, and is straight- 
forward in its expression ; but a tragic passion,, which is 
in its nature unavailing, like disappointment, regret of 
the inevitable, or remorse, is reflective, and liable to be 
continually diverted by the suggestions of fxncy. The 
one is a concentration of the will, which intensifies the 
character and the phrase that expresses it ; in the other, 
the will is helpless, and, as in insanity, while the flow of 
the mind sets imperatively in one direction, it is liable 
to almost ludicrous interruptions and diversions upon 
9 M 



194 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

the most trivial hint of involuntaiy association. I am 
ready to grant that Shakespeare sometimes allows his 
characters to spend time, that might be better employed, 
in carving some cherry-stone of a quibble ; * that he is 
sometimes tempted away from the natural by the quaint ; 
that he sometimes forces a partial, even a verbal, anal- 
ogy between the abstract thought and the sensual image 
into an absolute identity, giving us a kind of serious 
pun. In a pun our pleasure arises from a gap in the 
logical nexus too wide for the reason, but which the ear 
can bridge in an instant. " Is that jour own hare, or a 
wig 1 " The fancy is jet more tickled where logic is 
treated with a mock ceremonial of respect. 

" His head was turned, and so he chewed 
His pigtail till he died." 

Now when this kind of thing is done in earnest, the re- 
sult is one of those ill-distributed syllogisms which in 
rhetoric are called conceits. 

" Hard was the hand that struck the blow, 
Soft was the heart that bled." 

I have seen this passage from Warner cited for its 

beauty, though I should have thought nothing could be 

worse, had I not seen General Morris's 

" Her heart and morning broke together 
In tears." 

Of course, I would not rank with these Gloucester's 

" What ! will the aspiring blood of Lancaster 
Sink in the ground? I thought it Avould have mounted "; 

though as mere rhetoric it belongs to the same class, f 
* So Euripides (copied by Theocritus, Id. xxvii.): — 

HevOevg 6' ottco? /htj ireV&o? ei<rotcret 6d/u.oi5. (5acc/i«, 363.) 
'E<x(xi<j>p6v7](Tev ovK e;^ou<ra (Toxfypoueiu. (HippoL, 1037.) 

So Calderon: " Y apenas llega, cuando llega a penas." 

t I have taken the first passage in point that occurred to my mem- 
ory. It may not be Shakespeare's, though probably his. The ques- 
t io'i of authorship is, I think, settled, so fnv as criticism can do it. in 
Yii: Grant White's admirable essay appended to the Second Part of 
Henry VI. - - _ — 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 195 

It might be defended as a bit of ghastly humor charac- 
teristic of the speaker. But at any rate it is not with- 
out precedent in the two greater Greek tragedians. In 
a chorus of the Seven against Thehes we have : — 

€v Se yo.La 
Zwo. (/)ovopvTaJ 
Me/xiKTai, Ka.pT a 8' elcr' 6/u.aijaoi. 

And does not Sophocles make Ajax in his despair quibble 
upon his own name quite in the Shakespearian fashion, 
under similar circumstances ? Nor does the coarseness 
with which our great poet is reproached lack an ^Eschy- 
lean parallel. Even the Nurse in Borneo and Juliet 
would have found a true gossip in her of the Agamem- 
non, who is so indiscreet in her confidences concerning 
the nursery life of Orestes. AVhether Raleigh is right 
or not in warning historians against following truth too 
close upon the heels, the caution is a good one for poets 
as respects truth to Nature. But it is a mischievous 
fallacy in historian or critic to treat as a blemish of the 
man what is but the common tincture of his age. It is 
to confound a spatter of mud with a moral stain. 

But I have been led away from my immediate pur- 
pose* I did not intend to compare Shakespeare with 
the ancients, much less to justify his defects by theirs. 
Shakespeare himself has left us a pregTiant satire on 
dogmatical and categorical aesthetics (which commonly 
in discussion soon lose their ceremonious tails and are 
reduced to the internecine doo- and cat of their bald 
first syllables) in the cloud-scene between Hamlet and 
Polonius, suggesting exquisitely how futile is any at- 
tempt at a cast-iron definition of those perpetually 
metamorphic impressions of the beautiful whose source 
is as much in the man who looks as in the thing he sees. 
In the fine arts a thing is either good in itself or it is 
nothing. It neither gains nor loses by having it shown 



196 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

that another good thing was also good in itself, any 
more than a bad thing profits b}^ comparison with an- 
other that is worse. The final judgment of the world 
is intuitive, and is based, not on proof that a work pos- 
sesses some of the qualities of another whose gi'eatness 
is acknowledged, but on the immediate feeling that it 
carries to a high point of perfection certain qualities 
proper to itself One does not flatter a fine pear by 
comparing it to a fine peach, nor learn what a fine peach 
is by tasting ever so many poor ones. The boy who 
makes his first bite into one does not need to ask his 
flither if or how or why it is good. Because continuity 
is a merit in some kinds of writing, shall Ave refuse our- 
selves to the authentic charm of Montaigne's want of it ? 
I have heard people complain of French tragedies be- 
cause they were so very French. This^ though it may 
not be to some particular tastes, and may from one point 
of view be a defect, is from another and far higher a 
distinguished merit. It is their flavor, as direct a telltale 
of the soil whence they drew it as that of French wines 
is. Suppose we should tax the Elgin marbles with be- 
ing too Greek 1 AYlien will people, nay, when will even 
critics, get over this self-defrauding trick of cheapening 
the excellence of one thing by that of another, this con- 
clusive style of judgment which consists simply in be- 
longing to the other parish 1 As one grows older, one 
loses many idols, perhaps comes at last to have none at 
all, though he may honestly enough uncover in defer- 
ence to the worshippers before any shrine. But for tlie 
seeming loss the compensation is ample. These saints 
of literature descend from their canopied remoteness to 
be even more precious as men like ourselves, our com- 
j:)anions in field and street, speaking the same tongue, 
though in many dialects, and owning one creed under 
the most diverse masks of form. 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 197 

Much of that merit of structure which is claimed for 
the ancient tragedy is due, if I am not mistaken, to cir- 
cumstances external to the drama itself, — to custom, 
to convention, to the exigencies of the theatre. It is 
formal rather than organic. The Prometheus seems to 
me one of the few Greek tragedies in which the whole 
creation has developed itself in perfect proportion from 
one central germ of living conception. The motive of 
the ancient drama is generally outside of it, while in 
the modern (at least in the English) it is necessarily 
within. Goethe, in a thoughtful essay,* written man}?- 
years later than his famous criticism of Hamlet in 
Wilhelm Meister, says that the distinction between the 
two is the difference between sollen and ivolleny that is, 
between mitst and would. He means that in the Greek 
drama the catastrophe is foreordained by an inexorable 
Destiny, while the element of Freewill, and consequently 
of choice, is the very axis of the modern. The defini- 
tion is conveniently portable, but it has its limitations. 
Goethe's attention was too exclusively fixed on the Fate 
tragedies of the Greeks, and upon Shakespeare among 
the moderns. In the Spanish drama, for example, cus- 
tom, loyalty, honor, and religion are as imperative and 
as inevitable as doom. In the Antigone, on the other 
hand, the crisis lies in the character of the protagonist. 
In this sense it is modern, and is the first example of 
true character-painting in tragedy. But, from whatever 
cause, that exquisite analysis of complex motives, and 
the display of them in action and speech, which consti- 
tute for us the abiding charm of fiction, were quite un- 
known to the ancients. They reached their height in 
Cervantes and Shakespeare, and, though on a lower 
plane, still belong to the upper region of art in Le Sage, 
Moliere, and Fielding. The personages of the Greek 

* Shakspeare und kein Ende. 



198 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

tragedy seem to be commonly rather types than individ- 
uals. In the modern tragedy, certainly in the fom* 
greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies, there is still some- 
thing very like Destiny, only the place of it is changed. 
It is no longer above man, but in him ; yet the catas- 
trophe is as sternly foredoomed in the characters of Lear, 
Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet as it could be by an in- 
fallible oracle. In Macbeth, indeed, the Weird Sisters 
introduce an element very like Fate ; bi^t generally it 
may be said that with the Greeks the character is in- 
volved in the action, while with Shakespeare the action 
is evolved from the character. In the one case, the mo- 
tive of the play controls the personages ; in the other, 
the chief personages are in themselves the motive to 
which all else is subsidiary. In any comparison, there- 
fore, of Shakespeare wdth the ancients, we are not to 
contrast him with them as unapproachable models, but 
to consider whether he, like them, did not consciously en- 
deavor, under the circumstances and limitations in which 
he found himself, to produce the most excellent thing 
possible, a model also in its own kind, — whether higher 
or lower in degree is another question. The only fair 
comparison would be between him and that one of his 
contemporaries who endeavored to anachronize himself, 
so to speak, and to subject his art, so far as might be, to 
the laws of classical composition. Ben Jonson was a 
gi'eat man, and has sufficiently proved that he had an 
eye for the external marks of character ; but when he 
■would make a whole of them, he gives us instead either 
a bundle of humors or an incorporated idea. With 
Shakespeare the plot is an interior organism, in Jonson 
an external contrivance. It is the dijBference between 
man and tortoise. In the one the osseous struct oi-e is 
out of sight, indeed, but sustains the flesh and blood 
that envelop it, while the other is boxed up and impris- 
oned in his bones. 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 199 

I have been careful to confine myself to wliat may be 
called Shakespeare's ideal tragedies. In the piu-ely his- 
torical or chronicle plays, the conditions are different, 
and his imagination submits itself to the necessary re- 
strictions on its freedom of movement. Outside the 
tragedies also, the Tempest makes an exception worthy 
of notice. If I read it rightly, it is an example of how 
a great poet should write allegory, — not embodying 
metaphysical abstractions, but giving us ideals abstracted 
from life itself, suggesting an under-meaning everywhere, 
forcing it upon us nowhere, tantalizing the mind with 
hints that imply so much and tell so little, and yet keep 
the attention all eye and ear with eager, if fruitless, ex- 
pectation. Here the leading characters are not merely 
typical, but symbolical, — that is, they do not illustrate 
a class of persons, they belong to universal Nature. 
Consider the scene of the play. Shakespeare is wont to 
take some familiar story, to lay his scene in some place 
the name of which, at least, is familiar, — well knowing 
the reserve of power that lies in the familiar as a back- 
ground, when things are set in front of it under a new 
and unexpected light. But in the Tempest the scene is 
laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on 
any map. Nowhere, then 1 At once nowhere and any- 
where, — for it is in the soul of man, that still vexed 
island hung between the upj)er and the nether world, 
and liable to incursions from both. There is scarce a 
play of Shakespeare's in which there is such variety of 
character, none in which character has so little to do in 
the carrying on and development of the story. But 
consider for a moment if ever the Imagination has been 
so embodied as in Prosj^ero, the Fancy as in Ariel, the 
brute Understanding as in Caliban, who, the moment 
his poor wits are warmed with the glorious liquor of 
Stephano, plots rebellion against his natural lord, the 



200 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

higher Reason. Miranda is mere abstract Womanhood, 
as truly so before she sees Ferdinand as Eve before she 
was wakened to consciousness by the echo of her own 
nature coming back to her, the same, and yet not the 
same, from that of Adam. Ferdinand, again, is nothing 
more than Youth, compelled to drudge at something he 
despises, till the sacrifice of will and abnegation of self 
win him his ideal in Miranda. The subordinate person- 
ages are simply types ; Sebastian and Antonio, of weak 
character and evil ambition ; Gonzalo, of average sense 
and honesty ; Adrian and Francisco, of the walking 
gentlemen who serve to fill up a world. They are not 
characters in the same sense with lago, Falstaff", Shal- 
low, or Leontius ; and it is curious how every one of 
them loses his way in this enchanted island of life, all 
the victims of one illusion after another, except Pros- 
pero, whose ministers are purely ideal. The whole play, 
indeed, is a succession of illusions, winding up with those 
solemn words of the great enchanter who had summoned 
to his service every shape of merriment or j^assion, 
every figure in the great tragi-comedy of life, and who 
was now bidding farewell to the scene of his triumphs. 
For in Prospero shall we not recognize the Artist him- 
self, — 

*' That did not better for his life provide 
Than public means which public manners breeds, 
Whence comes it that his name receives a brand," — 

who has forfeited a shining place in the world's eye by 
devotion to his art, and who, turned adrift on the ocean 
of life in the leaky carcass of a boat, has shipwrecked 
on that Fortunate Island (as men always do who find 
their true vocation) where he is absolute lord, making 
all the powers of Nature serve him, but with Ariel and 
Caliban as special ministers ? Of whom else could he 
have been thinking, when he says, — 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 201 

" Graves, at my command, 
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth, 
By my so potent art " ? 

' Was this man, so extraordinary from whatever side 
we look at him, who ran so easily through the whole 
scale of human sentiment, from the homely common- 
sense of, " When two men ride of one horse, one must 
ride behind," to the transcendental subtilty of, 

" No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change j 
Thy pyramids, built up with newer might, 
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange ; 
They are but dressings of a former sight," — 

was he alone so unconscious of powers, some part of 
whose magic is recognized by all mankind, from the 
school-boy to the philosopher, that he merely sat by and 
saw them go without the least notion what they were 
about ? Was he an inspired idiot, votre bizarre Shake- 
speare ? a vast, irregular genius ? a simple rustic, war- 
bling his native wood-notes wild, in other words, insensi- 
ble to the benefits of culture % When attempts have 
been made at various times to prove that this singular 
and seemingly contradictory creature, not one, but all 
mankind's epitome, was a musician, a lawyer, a doctor, 
a Catholic, a Protestant, an atheist, an Irishman, a dis- 
coverer of the circulation of the blood, and finally, that 
he was not himself, but somebody else, is it not a little 
odd that the last thing anybody should have thought of 
proving him was an artist % Nobody believes any longer 
that immediate inspiration is possible in modern times 
(as if God had grown old), — at least, nobody believes it 
of the prophets of those days, of John of Leyden, or 
Reeves, or Muggleton, — and yet everybody seems to 
take it for granted of this one man Sh-akespeare. Ho, 
somehow or other, without knowing it^ was able to do 
what none of the rest of them, though knowing it all 
too perfectly well, could begin to do. Everybody seems 
9* 



202 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

to get afraid of him in turn. Voltaire plays gentleman 
usher for him to his countrymen, and then, perceiving 
that his countrymen find a flavor in him beyond that of 
Zaire or MaJiomet, discovers him to be a Sauvage ivre^ 
sans le moindre etincelle de hon go'dtj et sans le moindre 
connoissance des regies. Goethe, who tells us that Gotz 
von Berlichingen was written in the Shakespearian man- 
ner, — and we certainly should not have guessed it, if 
he had not blabbed, — comes to the final conclusion, 
that Shakespeare was a poet, but not a dramatist. 
Chateaubriand thinks that he has corrupted art. " If, 
to attain," he says, " the height of tragic art, it be 
enough to heap together disparate scenes without ordeT 
and without connection, to dovetail the burlesque with 
the j)athetic, to set the water-carrier beside the monarch 
and the huckster-wench beside the queen, who may not 
reasonably flatter himself with being the rival of the 
greatest masters 1 Whoever should give himself the 
trouble to retrace a single one of his days, .... to 
keep a journal from hour to hour, would have made a 
drama in the fashion of the English poet." But there 
journals and journals, as the French say, and what goes 
into them depends on the eye that gathers for them. 
It is a long step from St. Simon to Dangeau, from 
Pepys to Thoresby, from Shakespeare even to the Mar- 
quis de Chateaubriand. M. Hugo alone, convinced that, 
as founder of the French Romantic School, there is a 
kind of family likeness between himself and Shake- 
speare, stands boldly forth to prove the father as extrav- 
agant as the son. Calm yourself, M. Hugo, you are 
nt) more a child of his than Will Davenant was ! But, 
after all, is it such a great crime to produce something 
absolutely new in a world so tedious as ours, and so apt 
to tell its old stories over again % I do not mean new 
in substance, but in the manner of presentation. Surely 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 203 

the highest office of a great poet is to show us how 
much variety, freshness, and opportunity abides in the 
obvious and famihar. He invents nothing, but seems 
rather to re-discover the world about him, and his pene- 
trating vision gives to things of daily encounter some- 
thing of the strangeness of new creation. Meanwhile 
the changed conditions of modern life demand a change 
in the method of treatment. The ideal is not a strait- 
waistcoat. Because Alexis and Dora is so charming, 
shall we have no Paul and Virginia ? It was the idle 
endeavor to reproduce the old enchantment in the old 
way that gave us the pastoral, sent to the garret now 
with our grandmothers' achievements of the same sort in 
worsted. Every age says to its poets, like a mistress to 
her lover, " Tell me what I am like " ; and he who suc- 
ceeds in catching the evanescent expression that reveals 
character — which is as much as to say, what is intrin- 
sically human — will be found to have caught something 
as imperishable as human nature itself. Aristophanes, 
by the vital and essential qualities of his humorous 
satire, is already more nearly our contemporary than 
Moliere ; and even the Trouveres, careless and trivial as 
they mostly are, could fecundate a great poet like 
Chaucer, and are still delightful reading. 

The Attic tragedy still keeps its hold upon the loy- 
alty of scholars through their imagination, or their ped- 
antry, or their feeling of an exclusive property, as may 
happen, and, however alloyed with baser matter, this 
loyalty is legitimate and well bestowed. But the do- 
minion of the Shakespearian is even wider. It pushes 
forward its boundaries from year to year, and moves no 
landmark backward. Here Alfieri and Lessing own a 
common allegiance ; and the loyalty to him is one not 
of guild or tradition, but of conviction and enthusiasm. 
Can this be said of any other modern % of robust Cor- 



204 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

neille 1 of tender Racine 1 of Calderon even, with his 
tropical warmth and vigor of production I The Greeks 
and he are ahke and alone in this, and for the same rea- 
son, that both are unapproachably the highest in their 
kind. Call him Gothic, if you like, but the inspiring 
mind that presided over the growth of these clustered 
masses of arch and spire and pinnacle and buttress is 
neither Greek nor Gothic, — it is simply genius lending 
itself to embody the new desire of man's mind, as it 
had embodied the old. After all, to be delightful is to 
be classic, and the chaotic never pleases long. But 
manifoldness is not confusion, any more than formalism 
is simplicity. If Shakespeare rejected the unities, as I 
think he who complains of " Art made tongue-tied by 
Authority " might very well deliberately do, it was for 
the sake of an imaginative unity more intimate than 
any of time and place. The antique in itself is not the 
ideal, though its remoteness from the vulgarity of every- 
day associations helps to make it seem so. The true 
ideal is not opposed to the real, nor is it any artificial 
heightening thereof, but lies in it, and blessed are the 
eyes that find it ! It is the mens divinior which hides 
within the actual, transfiguring matter-of-fact into mat- 
ter-of-meaning for him who has the gift of second-sight. 
In this sense Hogarth is often more truly ideal than 
Raphael, Shakespeare often more truly so than the 
Greeks. I think it is a more or less conscious percep- 
tion of this ideality, as it is a more or less well-grounded 
persuasion of it as respects the Greeks, that assures to 
him, as to them, and with equal justice, a permanent 
supremacy over the minds of men. This gives to his 
characters their universality, to his thought its irradiat- 
ing property, while the artistic purpose running through 
and combining the endless variety of scene and charac- 
ter will alone account for his power of dramatic effect. 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 205 

Goethe affirmed, that, without Schroder's primings and 
adaptations, Shakespeare was too undramatic for the 
German theatre, — that, if the theory that his inlays 
should be represented textuallj should prevail, he would 
be driven from the boards. The theory has prevailed, 
and he not only holds his own, but is acted ofteuer than 
ever. It is not irregular genius that can do this, for 
surely Germany need not go abroad for what her own 
Werners could more than amply supply her with. 

But I would much rather quote a fine saying than a 
bad prophecy of a man to whom I owe so much. Goethe, 
in one of the most perfect of his shorter poems, tells us 
that a poem is like a painted window. Seen from with- 
out, (and he accordingly justifies the Philistine, who 
never looks at them otherwise,) they seem dingy and con- 
fused enough ; but enter, and then 

" Da ist's auf einmal farbig lielle, - 
Geschicht' und Zierath gliinzt in Schnelle." 

With the same, feeling he says elsewhere in prose, that 
" there is a destructive criticism and a productive. The 
former is very easy ; for one has only to set up in his mind 
any standard, any model, however narrow " (let ug say 
the Greeks), "and then boldly assert that the work 
under review does not match with it, and therefore is 
good for nothing, — the matter is settled, and one must 
at once deny its claim. Productive criticism is a gi-eat 
deal more difficult j it asks, What did the author propose 
to himself? Is what he proposes reasonable and com- 
prehensible 1 and how far has he succeeded in carrying it 
out 1 " It is in applying this latter kind of criticism to 
Shakespeare that the Germans have set us an example 
worthy of all commendation. If they have been some- 
times over-subtile, they at least had the merit of first 
looking at his works as wholes, as something that very 
likely contained an idea, perhaps conveyed a moral, if v* e 



206 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

could get at it. The illumination lent us by most of the 
English commentators reminds us of the candles which 
guides hold up to show us a picture in a dark place, the 
smoke of which gradually makes the work of the artist 
invisible under its repeated layers. Lessing, as might 
have been expected, opened the first glimpse in the new 
direction ; Goethe followed with his famous exposition of 
Hamlet ; A. W. Schlegel took a more comprehensive 
view in his Lectures, which Coleridge worked over into 
English, adding many fine criticisms of his own on single 
passages ; and finally, Gervinus has devoted four volumes 
to a comment on the plays, full of excellent matter, 
though pushing the moral exegesis beyond all reasonable 
bounds.* With the help of all these, and especially of 
the last, I shall apply this theory of criticism to Hamlet, 
not in the hope of saying anything new, but of bringing 
something to the support of the thesis, that, if Shake- 
speare was skilful as a playwright, he was even greater as 
a dramatist, — that, if his immediate business was to fill 
the theatre, his higher object was to create something 
which, by fulfilling the conditions and answering the re- 
quirements of modern life, should as truly deserve to be 
called a work of art as others had deserved it by doing 
the same thing in former times and under other circum- 
stances. Supposing him to have accepted — consciously 
or not is of little importance — the new terms of the 
problem which makes character the pivot of dramatic 
action, and consequently the key of dramatic unit}^, how 
far did he succeed 1 

Before attempting my analysis, I must clear away a 
little rubbish. Are such anachronisms as those of which 
Voltaire accuses Shakespeare in Hamlet, such as the in- 
troduction of cannon before the invention of gunpowder, 

* I do not mention Ulrici's book, for it seems to me unwieldy and 
dull, — zeal without knowledge. - 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 207 

and making Christians of the Danes three centuries too 
soon, of the least bearing aesthetically 1 I think not ; but 
as they are of a piece with a great many other criti- 
cisms upon the gi'eat poet, it is worth while to dwell 
upon them a moment. 

The first demand we make upon whatever claims to be 
a work of art (and we have a right to make it) is 
that it shall be in keejnng. Now this propriety is of two 
kinds, either extrinsic or intrinsic. In the first I should 
class whatever relates rather to the body than the soul 
of the work, such as fidelity to the facts of history, 
(wherever that is important.) congruity of costume, and 
the like, — in short, whatever might come under the 
head of picturesque truth, a departure from which would 
shock too rudely our preconceived associations. I have 
seen an Indian chief in French boots, and he seemed to 
me almost tragic ', but, put upon the stage in tragedy, he 
would have been ludicrous. Lichtenberg, waiting from 
London in 1775, tells us that Garrick played Hamlet in 
a suit of the French fashion, then commonly worn, and 
that he was blamed for it by some of the critics ; but, he 
says, one hears no such criticism during the play, nor on 
the way home, nor at supper afterwards, nor indeed till 
the emotion roused by the great actor has had time to 
subside. He justifies Garrick, though we should not be 
able to endure it now. Yet nothing would be gained by 
trying to make Hamlet's costume true to the assumed 
period of the play, for the scene of it is laid in a Den- 
mark that has no dates. 

In the second and more important category, I should 
put, first, co-ordination of character, that is, a certain 
variety in harmony of the personages of a drama, as in 
the attitudes and coloring of the figures in a pictorial 
composition, so that, while mutually relieving and set- 
ting off each other, they shall combine in the total im- 



208 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

pression ; second, that subordinate truth to Nature which 
makes each character coherent in itself; and, third, such 
propriety of costume and the like as shall satisfy the su- 
perhistoric sense, to which, and to which alone, the 
higher drama appeals. All these come within the scope 
of imaginative truth. To illustrate my third head by 
an example. Tieck criticises .John Kemble's dressing for 
Macbeth in a modern Highland costume, as being un- 
graceful without any countervailing merit of historical 
exactness. I think a deeper reason for his dissatis- 
faction might be found in the fact, that this garb, with 
its purely modern and British army associations, is out 
of place on Fores Heath, and drags the Weird Sis- 
ters down with it from their proper imaginative remote- 
ness in the gloom of the past to the disenchanting glare 
of the foot-lights. It is not the antiquarian, but the 
pbetic conscience, that is wounded. To this, exactness, 
so far as concerns ideal representation, may not onty not 
be truth, but may even be opposed to it. Anachronisms 
and the like are in themselves of no account, and become 
important only when they make a gap too wide for our 
illusion to cross unconsciously, that is, when they are 
anacoluthons to the imagination. The aim of the artist 
is psychologic, not historic truth. It is comparatively 
easy for an author to get iip any period with tolerable 
minuteness in externals, but readers and audiences find 
more difficulty in getting them down, though oblivion 
swallows scores of them at a gulp. The saving truth in 
such matters is a truth to essential and permanent 
characteristics. The Ulysses of Shakespeare, like the 
Ulysses of Dante and Tennyson, more or less harmonizes 
with our ideal conception of the wary, long-considering, 
though adventurous son of Laertes, yet Simon Lord Lovat 
is doubtless nearer the original tyj)e. In Hamlet, though 
there is no Denmark of the ninth century, Shakespeare 



SHAKESPEARi: ONCE MOHE. 200 

lias suggested the prevailing rudeness of manners quite 
enough for his purpose. We see it in the single combat 
of Hamlet's father with the elder Fortinbras, in the vul- 
gar wassail of the king, in the English monarch being 
expected to hang Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of 
hand merely to oblige his cousin of Denmark, in Laertes, 
sent to Paris to be made a gentleman of, becoming in- 
stantly capable of any the most barbarous treachery to 
glut his vengeance. We cannot fancy Ragnar Lodbrog 
or Eric the Red matriculating at Wittenberg, but it was 
essential that Hamlet should be a scholar, and Shake- 
speare sends him thither without more ado. All through 
the play we get the notion of a state of society in which 
a savage natiu'e has disguised itself in the externals of 
civilization, like a Maori deacon, who has only to strip 
and he becomes once more a tattooed pagan with his 
mouth watering for a spare-rib of his pastor. Histori- 
cally, at the date of Hamlet, the Danes were in the 
habit of burning their enemies alive in their houses, 
with as much of their family about them as might be 
to make it comfortable. Shakespeare seems purposely 
to have dissociated his play from history by changing 
nearly every name in the original legend. I The motive 
of the play — revenge as a religious duty — belongs 
only to a social state in which the traditions of barba- 
rism are still operative, but, with infallible artistic judg- 
ment, Shakespeare has chosen, not untamed Nature, as 
he found it in history, but the period of transition, a 
period in w^hich the times are always out of joint, and 
thus the irresolution which has its root in Hamlet's own 
character is stimulated by the very incompatibility of 
that legacy of vengeance he has inherited from the past 
with the new culture and refinement of which he is the 
representative. One of the few books w^hich Sliake- 
speare is known to have possessed was Florio's Montaigne, 



210 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

and he might well have transferred the Frenchman's 
motto, Que s<^ais je ? to the front of his tragedy ; nor 
can I help ftmcying something more than accident in the 
fact that Hamlet has been a student at Wittenberg, 
whence those new ideas went forth, of whose results in 
unsettling men's faith, and consequently disqualifying 
them for promptness in action, Shakespeare had been 
i\ot only an eye-witness, but which he must actually 
have experienced in himself. 

One other objection let me touch ujwn here, especially 
as it has been urged against Hamlet, and that is the in- 
troduction of low characters and comic scenes in tragedy. 
Even Garrick, who had just assisted at the Stratford 
Jubilee, where Shakespeare had been pronounced divine, 
was induced by this absurd outcry for the proprieties of 
the tragic stage to omit the grave-diggers' scene from 
Hamlet. Leaving apart the fact that Shakespeare would 
not have been the representative poet he is, if he had 
not given expression to this striking tendency of the 
Northern races, which shows itself constantly, not only 
in their literature, but even in their mythology and their 
architecture, the grave-diggers' scene always impresses 
me as one of the most pathetic in the whole tragedy. 
That Shakespeare introduced such scenes and characters 
with deliberate intention, and with a view to artistic re- 
lief and contrast, there can hardly be a doubt. We 
must take it for granted that a man whose works show 
everywhere the results of judgment sometimes acted 
with forethought. I find the springs of the profoundest 
sorrow and pity in this hardened indifference of the 
grave-diggers, in their careless discussion as to whether 
Ophelia's death was by suicide or no, in their singing 
and jesting at their dreary work. 



" A pickaxe and a spade, a spade, 
For — and a shroudinc-sheet: 



ii 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 211 

O, a pit of clay for to be made 
For such a guest is meet ! " 

We know who is to be the guest of this earthen hospi- 
tality, — how much beauty, love, and heartbreak are to 
be covered in that pit of clay. All we remember of 
Ophelia reacts upon us with tenfold force,, and we recoil 
from our amusement at the ghastly drollery of the two 
delvers with a shock of horror. That the unconscious 
Hamlet should stumble on this grave of all others, that 
it should be here that he should pause to muse humor- 
ously on death and decay, — all this prepares us for the 
revulsion of passion in the next scene, and for the frantic 
confession, — 

" 1 loved Ophelia ; forty thousand brothers 
Could not with all their quantity of love 
Make up my sum ! " 

And it is only here that such an asseveration would be 
true even to the feeling of the moment ; for it is plain 
from all we know of Hamlet that he could not so have 
loved Ophelia, that he was incapable of the self-aban- 
donment of a true passion, that he would have analyzed 
this emotion as he does all others, would have peeped 
and botanized upon it till it became to him a mere mat- 
ter of scientific interest. All this force of contrast, and 
this horror of surprise, were necessary so to intensify his 
remorseful regret that he should believe himself for once in 
earnest. The speech of the King, "0, he is mad, Laertes," 
recalls him to himself, and he at once begins to rave : — 

*' Zounds ! show me what thou 'It do ! 
Woul'tweep? woul't fight V woul'tfast? woul't tear thyself ? 
Woul't drink up eysil ? eat a crocodile ? " 

It is easy to see that the whole plot hinges upon the 
character of Hamlet, that Shakespeare's conception of 
this was the ovum out of which the whole organism was 
hatched. And here let me remark, that there is a kind 



212 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

of genealogical necessity in the character, — a thing not 
altogether strange to the attentive reader of Shakespeare. 
Hamlet seems the natural result of the mixture of father 
and mother in his temperament, the resolution and per- 
sistence of the one, like sound timber wormholed and 
made shaky, as it were, by the other's infirmity of will 
and discontinuity of purpose. In natures so imperfectly 
mixed it is not uncommon to find vehemence of inten- 
tion the prelude and counterpoise of weak performance, 
the consciovis nature striving to keep up its self-respect 
by a triumph in words all the more resolute that it feels 
assured beforehand of inevitable defeat in action. As in 
such slipshod housekeeping men are their own largest 
creditors, they find it easy to stave ofi" utter bankruptcy 
of conscience by taking up one unpaid promise with 
another larger, and at heavier interest, till such self- 
swindling becomes habitual and by degrees almost pain- 
less. How did Coleridge discount his own notes of this 
kind with less and less specie as the figures lengthened 
on the paper ! As with Hamlet, so it is with Ophelia 
and Laertes. The father's feebleness comes up again 
in the wasting heartbreak and gentle lunacy of the 
daughter, while the son shows it in a rashness of im- 
pulse and act, a kind of crankiness, of whose essential 
feebleness we are all the more sensible as contrasted 
with a nature so steady on its keel, and drawing so much 
water, as that of Horatio, — the foil at once, in different 
ways, to both him and Hamlet. It was natural, also, 
that the daughter of self-conceited old Polonius should 
have her softness stiffened with a fibre of obstinacy ; for 
there are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks, and 
that which bends. Ophelia's is of the former kind ; 
Hero is her counterpart, giving way before calamity, and 
rising again so soon as the pressure is removed. 

I find two passages in Dante that contain the exact- 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 213 

est possible definition of that habit or quality of Hamlet's 
mind which justifies the tragic turn of the play, and 
renders it natural and unavoidable from the beginning. 
The first is from the second canto of the Inferno : — 

" E quale k quel clie dis\Tiol cio clie voile, 
E per nuovi pensier cangia proposta, 
Si che del cominciar tutto si tolle; 
Tal mi fee' io in quella oscura costa: 
Percli^ pensando consumai la impresa 
Che fu nel cominciar cotanto tosta." 

•* And like the man who unwills what he willed, 
And for new thought^j doth change his first intent, 
So that he cannot anywhere begin, 
Such became I upon that slope obscure, 
Because with thinking I consumed resolve. 
That was so ready at the setting out." 

Again, in the fifth of the Purgatorio : — 

" Che sempre 1' uomo in cui pensier rampoglia 
Sovra pensier, da se dilunga il segno, 
Perche la foga T un dell' altro insolla." 

" For always he in whom one thought buds forth 
Out of another farther puts the goal, 
For each has only force to mar the other." 

Dante was a profound metaphysician, and as in the 
first passage he describes and defines a certain quality of 
mind, so in the other he tells us its result in the charac- 
ter and life, namely, indecision and failure, — the goal 
farther off at the end than at the beginning. It is re- 
markable how close a resemblance of thought, and even 
of expression, there is between the former of these quota- 
tions and a part of Hamlet's famous soliloquy : — 

*' Thus conscience [i. e. consciousness] doth make cowards of us all: 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
And enterprises of great pitch and moment 
With this regard their cun-ents turn awry. 
And lose the name of action! " 

It is an iuherent peculiarity of a mind like Hamlet's 
that it should be conscious of its ow^n defect. Men of 



214 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

his type are forever analyzing their own emotions and 
motives. They cannot do anything, because they always 
see two ways of doing it. They cannot determine en 
any course of action, because they are always, as it were, 
standing at the cross-roads, and see too well the disadvan- 
tages of every one of them. It is not that they are 
incapable of resolve, but somehow the band between the 
motive power and the operative faculties is relaxed and 
loose. The engine works, but the machinery it should 
drive stands still. The imagination is so much in over- 
plus, that thinking a thing becomes better than doing it, 
and thought wdth its easy perfection, capable of every- 
thing because it can accomplish everything with ideal 
means, is vastly more attractive and satisfactory than 
deed, which must be wrought at best with imperfect 
instruments, and always falls short of the conception 
that went before it. " If to do," says Portia in the 
Merchant of Venice, — "if to do were as easy as to know 
w'hat 't were good to do, chapels had been churches, and 
poor men's cottages princes' palaces." Hamlet knows 
only too well what 't were good to do, but he palters 
with everything in a double sense : he sees the grain of 
good there is in evil, and the grain of evil there is in 
good, as they exist in the world, and, finding that he can 
make those feather-weighted accidents balance each other, 
infers that there is little to choose between the essences 
themselves. He is of Montaigne's mind, and says express- 
ly that " there is nothing good or ill, but thinking makes 
it so." He dwells so exclusively in the world of ideas 
that the world of facts seems trifling, nothing is worth 
the while ; and he has been so long objectless and pur- 
poseless, so far as actual life is concerned, that, when 
at last an object and an aim are forced upon him, 
he cannot deal with them, and gropes about vainly for 
a motive outside of himself that shall marshal his 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 215 

thoughts for him and guide his faculties into the path 
of action. He is the victim not so much of feebleness 
of will as of an intellectual indifference that hinders the 
will from working long in any one direction. He wishes 
to will, but never wills. His continual iteration of re- 
solve shows that he has no resolution. He is capable 
of passionate energy where the occasion presents itself 
suddenly from without, because nothing is so irritable as 
conscious irresolution with a duty to perform. But of 
deliberate energy he is not capable ; for there the im- 
pulse must come from within, and the blade of his 
analysis is so subtile that it can divide the finest hair 
of motive 'twixt north and northwest side, leaving him 
desperate to choose between them. . The very conscious- 
ness of his defect is an insuperable bar to his repairing 
it ; for the unity of purpose, which infuses every fibre 
of the character with will available whenever wanted, 
is impossible where the mind can never rest till it has 
resolved that unity into its component elements, and 
satisfied itself which on the whole is of greater value. 
A critical instinct so insatiable that it must turn upon 
itself, for lack of something else to hew and hack, be- 
comes incapable at last of originating anything except 
indecision. It becomes infallible in what not to do. 
How easily he might have accomplished his task is 
shown by the conduct of Laertes. When he has a death 
to avenge, he raises a mob, breaks into the palace, bul- 
lies the king, and proves how weak the usurper really was. 
The world is the victim of splendid parts, and is slow 
to accept a rounded whole, because that is something 
which is long in completing, still longer in demonstrating 
its completion. We like to be surprised into admira- 
tion, and not logically convinced that we ought to admire. 
AYe are willing to be delighted with success, though we 
are somewhat indifferent to the homely qualities which 



216 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MOEE. 

insure it. Our thought is so filled with the rocket's burst 
of momentary splendor so far above us, that we forget 
the i:)oor stick, useful and unseen, that made its climb- 
ing possible. One of these homely qualities is continu- 
ity of character, and it escapes present applause because 
it tells chiefly, in the long run, in results. With his 
usual tact, Shakespeare has brought in such a character 
as a contrast and foil to Hamlet. Horatio is the only 
complete man in the play, — solid, well-knit, and true ; 
a noble, quiet nature, with that highest of all qualities, 
judgment, always sane and prompt ; who never drags 
his anchors for any wind of opinion or fortune, but grips 
all the closer to the reality of things. He seems one of 
those calm, undemonstrative men whom we love and 
admire without asking to know why, crediting them 
with the capacity of great things, without any test of 
actual achievement, because we feel that their manhood 
is a constant quality, and no mere accident of circum- 
stance and opportunity. Such men are alwa3^s sure of 
the presence of their highest self on demand. Hamlet 
is continually drawing bills on the future, secured by 
his promise of himself to himself, which he can never 
redeem. His own somewhat feminine nature recognizes 
its complement in Horatio, and clings to it instinctively, 
as naturally as Horatio is attracted by that fatal gift of 
imagination, the absence of which makes the strength 
of his own character, as its overplus does the weakness 
of Hamlet's. It is a happy marriage of two minds 
drawn together by the charm of unlikeness. Hamlet feels 
in Horatio the solid steadiness which he misses in him- 
self ; Horatio in Hamlet that need of service and sustain- 
ment to render which gives him a consciousness of his own 
value. Hamlet fills the place of a woman to Horatio, 
revealing him to himself not only in what he says, but 
by a constant claim upon his strength of nature ; and 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 217 

there is great psychological truth in making suicide the 
first imjDulse of this quiet, undemonstrative man, after 
Hamlet's death, as if the very reason for his being were 
taken away with his friend's need of him. In his grief, 
he for the first and only time speaks of himself, is first 
made conscious of himself by his loss. If this manly 
reserve of Horatio be true to Nature, not less so are the 
communicativeness of Hamlet, and his tendency to so- 
liloquize. If self-consciousness be alien to the one, it is 
just as truly the happiness of the other. Like a musi- 
cian distrustful of himself, he is forever tuning his in- 
strument, first overstraining this cord a little, and then 
that, but unable to bring them into unison, or to profit 
by it if he could. 

We do not believe that Horatio ever thought he " was 
not a pipe for Fortune's finger to play what stop she 
please," till Hamlet told him so. That was Fortune's 
aff'air, not his ; let her try it, if she liked. He is un- 
conscious of his own peculiar qualities, as men of decis- 
ion commonly are, or they would not be men of decision. 
When there is a thing to be done, they go straight at it, 
and for the time there is nothing for them in the whole 
universe but themselves and their object. Hamlet, on 
the other hand, is always studying himself This world 
and the other, too, are alwaj^s present to his mind, and 
there in the corner is the little black kobold of a doubt 
making mouths at him. He breaks down the bridges 
before him, not behind him, as a man of action would 
do ; but there is something more than this. He is an 
ingrained sceptic ; though his is the scepticism, not of 
reason, but of feeling, whose root is want of faith in 
himself In him it is passive, a malady rather than a 
function of the mind. We might call him insincere : 
not that he was in any sense a hypocrite, but only that 
he never was and never could be in earnest. Never 
10 



218 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

could be, because no man without intense faith in some- 
thing ever can. Even if he only believed in himself, 
that were better than nothing ; for it w^ill carry a man a 
great way in the outward successes of life, nay, will even 
sometimes give him the Archimedean fulcrum for mov- 
ing the world. But Hamlet doubts everything. He 
doubts the immortality of the soul, just after seeing his 
father's spirit, and hearing from its mouth the secrets of 
the other world. He doubts Horatio even, and swears 
him to secrecy on the cross of his sword, though prob- 
ably he himself has no assured belief in the sacredness 
of the symbol. He doubts Ophelia, and asks her, " Are 
you honest 1 " He doubts the ghost, after he has had a 
little time to think about it, and so gets up the play to 
test the guilt of the king. And how coherent the whole 
character is ! With what perfect tact and judgment 
Shakespeare, in the advice to the players, makes him an 
exquisite critic ! For just here that part of his charac- 
ter which would be weak in dealing with affairs is strong. 
A vrise scepticism is the first attribute of a good critic. 
He must not believe that the fire-insurance offices will 
raise their rates of premium on Charles River, because 
the new volume of poems is printing at Riverside or the 
University Press. He must not believe so profoundly in 
the ancients as to think it wholly out of the question 
that the world has still vigor enough in its loins to be- 
get some one who will one of these days be as good an 
ancient as any of them. 

Another striking quality in Hamlet's nature is his per- 
petual inclination to irony. I think this has been gen- 
erally passed over too lightly, as if it were something 
external and accidental, rather assumed as a mask than 
part of the real nature of the man. It seems to me to 
go deeper, to be something innate, and not merely facti- 
tious. It is nothing like the grave irony of Socrates, 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 219 

"which was the weapon of a man thoroughly in earnest, 
— the boomerang of argument, which one throws in the 
opposite direction of what he means to hit, and which 
seems to be flying away from the adversary, who will 
presently find himself knocked down by it. It is not 
like the irony of Timon, which is but the wilful refrac- 
tion of a clear mind twisting awry whatever enters it, — 
or of lago, which is the slime that a nature essentially 
evil loves to trail over all beauty and goodness to taint 
them with distrust : it is the half-jest, half-earnest of an 
inactive temperament that has not quite made up its 
mind whether life is a reality or no, whether men were 
not made in jest, and which amuses itself equally with 
finding a deep meaning in trivial things and a trifling 
one in the profoundest mysteries of being, because the 
want of earnestness in its own essence infects everything 
else with its own indifference. If there be now and then 
an unmannerly rudeness and bitterness in it, as in the 
scenes with Polonius and Osrick, we must remember that 
Hamlet was just in the condition which spurs men to 
sallies of this kind : dissatisfied, at one neither with the 
world nor with himself, aud accordingly casting about 
for something out of himself to vent his spleen upon. 
But even in these passages there is no hint of earnest- 
ness, of any purpose beyond the moment; they are mere 
cat's-paws of vexation, and not the deep-raking ground- 
swell of passion, as we see it in the sarcasm of Lear. 

The question of Hamlet's madness has been much dis- 
cussed and variously decided. High medical authority 
has pronounced, as usual, on both sides of the question. 
But the induction has been drawn from too narrow 
premises, being based on a mere diagnosis of the case, 
and not on an appreciation of the character in its com- 
pleteness. We have a case of pretended madness in the 
Edgar of King Lear ; and it is certainly true that that 



220 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

is a charcoal sketch, coarsely outlined, compared with 
the delicate dra^Ying, the lights, shades, and half-tints 
of the portraiture in Hamlet. But does this tend to 
prove that the madness of the latter, because truer to 
the recorded observation of experts, is real, and meant 
to be real, as the other to be fictitious ? Not in the 
least, as it appears to me. Hamlet, among all the 
characters of Shakespeare, is the most eminently a meta- 
physician and psychologist. He is a close observer, con- 
tinually analyzing his own nature and that of others, 
letting fall his little drops of acid irony on all who come 
near him, to make them show what they are made of. 
Even Ophelia is not too sacred, Osrick not too contempti- 
ble for experiment. If such a man assumed madness, 
he would play his part perfectly. If Shakespeare him- 
self, without going mad, could so observe and remember 
all the abnormal symptoms as to be able to reproduce 
them in Hamlet, why should it be beyond the power of 
Hamlet to reproduce them in himself? If you deprive 
Hamlet of reason, there is no truly tragic motive left. 
He would be a fit subject for Bedlam, but not for the 
stage. We might have pathology enough, but no pathos. 
Ajax first becomes tragic when he recovers his wits. If 
Hamlet is irresponsible, the whole play is a chaos. That 
he is not so might be proved by evidence enough, were 
it not labor thrown away. 

This feigned madness of Hamlet's is one of the few 
points in which Shakespeare has kept close to the old 
story on which he founded his play ; and as he never 
decided without deliberation, so he never acted without 
unerring judgment. Hamlet drifts through the whole 
tragedy. He never keeps on one tack long enough to- 
get steerage-way, even if, in a nature like his, with those 
electric streamers of whim and fancy forever wavering 
across the vault of his brain, the needle of judgment 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MOEE. 221 

would point in one direction long enough to strike a 
course by. The scheme of simulated insanity is pre- 
cisely the one he would have been likely to hit upon, be- 
cause it enabled him to follow his own bent, and to drift 
with an apparent purpose, postponing decisive action by 
the very means he adopts to arrive at its accomplish- 
ment, and satisfying himself with the show of doing 
something that he may escape so much the longer the 
dreaded necessity of really doing anything at all. It 
enables him to lolay with life and duty, instead of tak- 
ing them by the rougher side, where alone any firm grip 
is possible, — to feel that he is on the way toward ac- 
complishing somewhat, when he is really paltering with 
his own irresolution. Nothing, I think, could be more 
finely imagined than this. Voltaire complains that he 
goes mad without any sufficient object or residt. Per- 
fectly true, .and precisely what was most natural for him 
to do, and, accordingly, precisely what Shakespeare 
meant that he should do. It was delightful to him to 
indulge his imagination and humor, to prove his ca- 
pacity for something by playing a part : the one thing he 
could not do was to bring himself to act, unless when 
surprised by a sudden impulse of suspicion, — as where 
he kills Polonius, and there he could not see his victim. 
He discourses admirably of suicide, but does not kill 
himself; he talks daggers, but uses none. He puts by 
the chance to kill the king with the excuse that he will 
not do it while he is praying, lest his soul be saved 
thereby, though it is more than doubtful whether he be- 
lieved it himself. He allows himself to be packed off" to 
England, without any motive except that it would for 
the time take him farther from a present duty : the 
more disagreeable to a nature like his because it ivas 
present, and not a mere matter for speculative consider- 
ation. When Goethe made his famous comparison of 



222 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

the acorn planted in a vase which it bursts with its 
growth, and says that in hke manner Hamlet is a na- 
ture which breaks down under the weight of a duty too 
great for it to bear, he seems to have considered the 
character too much from one side. Had Hamlet actually 
killed himself to escape his too onerous commission, 
Goethe's conception of him would have been satisfactory 
enough. But Hamlet was hardly a sentimentalist, like 
Werther ; on the contrary, he saw things only too 
clearly in the dry north-light of the intellect. It is 
chance that at last brings him to his end. It would ap- 
pear rather that Shakespeare intended to show us an 
imaginative temperament brought face to face with actu- 
alities, into any clear relation of sympathy with which 
it cannot bring itself. The very means that Shakespeare 
makes use of to lay upon him the obligation of acting — 
the ghost — really seems to make it all the harder for him 
to act ; for the spectre but gives an additional excitement 
to his imagination and a fresh topic for his scepticism. 

I shall not attempt to evolve any high moral signifi- 
cance from the play, even if I thought it possible ; for 
that would be aside from the present purpose. The 
scope of the higher drama is to represent life, not every- 
day life, it is true, but life lifted above the plane of 
bread-and-butter associations, by nobler reaches of lan- 
guage, by the influence at once inspiring and modulating 
of verse, by an intenser play of passion condensing that 
misty mixture of feeling and reflection which makes the 
ordinary atmosphere of existence into flashes of thought 
and phrase whose brief, but terrible, illumination prints 
the outworn landscape of every-day upon our brains, 
with its little motives and mean results, in lines of tell- 
tale fire. The moral office of tragedy is to show us our 
own weaknesses idealized in grander figures and more aw- 
ful results, — to teach us that what we pardon in our- 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 223 

selves as venial faults, if they seem to have but slight 
influence on oiu' immediate fortunes, have arms as long 
as those of kings, and reach forward to the catastrophe 
of our lives, that they are dry-rotting the very fibre of 
will and conscience, so that, if we should be brought to 
the test of a gi'eat temptation or a stringent emergenc}", 
we must be involved in a ruin as sudden and complete 
as that we shudder at in the unreal scene of the theatre. 
But the primary object of a tragedy is not to inculcate a 
formal moral. Representing life, it teaches, like life, by 
indirection, by those nods and winks that are thrown 
away on us blind horses in such profusion. We may 
learn, to be sure, plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. 
We are not likely to have kingdoms to divide, crowns 
foretold us by weird sisters, a father's death to avenge, 
or to kill our wives from jealousy ; but Lear may teach 
us to draw the line more clearly between a wise gene- 
rosity and a loose-handed weakness of giving ; Macbeth, 
how one sin involves another, and forever another, by a 
fatal parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocks 
forbidden doors to our will or passion leaves a stain on 
the hand, that may not be so dark as blood, but that 
will not out; Hamlet, that all the noblest gifts of per- 
son, temperament, and mind slip like sand through the 
grasp of an infirm purpose ; Othello, that the perpetual 
silt of some one weakness, the eddies of a suspicious 
temper depositing their one impalpable layer after an- 
other, may build up a shoal on which an heroic life and 
an otherwise magnanimous nature may bilge and go to 
pieces. All this we may learn, and much more, and 
Shakespeare was no doubt well aware of all this and 
more ; but I do not believe that he wrote his pla3's 
with any such didactic purpose. He knew human na- 
ture too well not to know that one thorn of experience 
is worth a whole wilderness of warning, — that, where 



224 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORfi. 

one man shapes his hfe by precept and example, there 
are a thousand who have it shaped for them by impulse 
and by circumstances. He did not mean his great trage- 
dies for scarecrows, as if the nailing of one hawk to 
the barn-door would prevent the next from coming down 
souse into the hen-yard. No, it is not the poor bleach- 
ing victim hung up to moult its draggled feathers in the 
rain that he wishes to show us. He loves the hawk- 
nature as well as the hen-nature ; and if he is unequalled 
in anything, it is in that sunny breadth of view, that 
impregnability of reason, that looks down all ranks and 
conditions of men, all fortune and misfortune, with the 
equal eye of the pure artist. 

Whether I have fancied anything into Hamlet which 
the author never dreamed of putting there I do not 
greatly concern myself to inquire. Poets arc always en- 
titled to a royalty on whatever we find in their works ; 
for these fine creations as truly build themselves up in 
the brain as they are built up with deliberate fore- 
thought. Praise art as we will, that which the artist 
did not mean to put into his work, but which found it- 
self there by some generous process of Nature of which 
he was as unaware as the blue river is of its rhyme with 
the blue sky, has somewhat in it that snatches us into 
sympathy with higher things than those which come by 
plot and observation. Goethe wrote his Faust in its 
earliest form without a thought of the deeper meaning 
which the exposition of an age of criticism was to find 
in it : without foremeaning it, he had impersonated in 
Mephistopheles the genius of his century. Shall this 
subtract from the debt we owe him % Not at all. If 
originality were conscious of itself, it would have lost its 
right to be original. I believe that Shakespeare intended 
to impersonate in Hamlet not a mere metaphj^sical entity, 
but a man of flesh and blood : yet it is certainly curious 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 225 

how i))'ophetically typical the character is of that intro- 
version of mind which is so constant a phenomenon of 
these latter days, of that over-consciousness which wastes 
itself in analyzing the motives of action instead of 
acting. 

The old painters had a rule, that all compositions 
should be lyvramidal in form, — a central figure, from 
which the others slope gradually away on the two sides. 
Shakespeare probably had never heard of tliis rule, and, 
if he had, woujil not have been likely to resj^ect it more 
than he has the so-called classical unities of time and 
place. But he understood perfe(;tly the artistic advan- 
tages of gradation, contrast, and relief Taking Hamlet 
as the key-note, we find in him weakness of character, 
which, on the one hjuid. is contrasted with the feebleness 
that sprnigs from overweening conceit in Polonius and 
with frailty of temperament in Ophelia, while, on the 
other hand, it is brought into fuller relief by the steady 
force of Horatio and the impulsive violence of Laertes, 
who is resolute from thoughtlessness, just as Hamlet is 
irresolute from overplus of thought. 

If we mu^t draw a moral from Hamlet, it would seem 
to be, that Vrill is Fate, and that, Will once abdicating, 
the inevitable successor in the regencj^ is Chance. Had 
Hamlet acted, instead of musing how, good it woiild be 
to act, the kina- might have been the only victim. As 
it is, all the nu'in actors in the storj^ are the fortuitous 
sacrifice of his irresolution. We see how a single great 
vice of character at last dra a.s to itself as allies and 
confederates all otlier weaknesses of the man, as in civil 
wars the timid and the selfish v/ait ta throw themselves 
upon the stronger si'le. 

*' In Life's small things bo resolute and great 
To keep thy mu.-elos trained: know'st tlion wlien Fate 
Thy measure takes? or when she'll say to thee, 
' I find thee worthy, do this thing for me ' ? " 

10* ' O 



226 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 

I have said that it was doubtful if Shakespeare had 
any conscious moral intention in his writings. I meant 
only that he was purely and primarily poet. And 
while he was an English poet in a sense that is true 
of no other, his method was thoroughly Greek, yet 
with this remarkable difference, — that, while the Greek 
dramatists took purely national themes and gave them 
a universal interest by their mode of treatment, he 
took what may be called cosmopolitan traditions, le- 
gends of human nature, and nationalized them by the 
infusion of his perfectly Anglican breadth of character 
and solidity of understanding. Wonderful as his ima- 
gination and fancy are, his perspicacity and artistic 
discretion ar5 more so. This country tradesman's son, 
coming up to London, could set high-bred wits, like 
Beaumont, uncopiable lessons in drawing gentlemen 
such as are seen nowhere else but on the canvas of 
Titian ; he could take Ulysses away from Homer and 
expand the shrewd and crafty islander into a statesman 
whose words are the pith of history. But what makes 
him yet more exceptional was his utterl}^ unimpeachable 
judgment, and that poise of character which enabled 
him to be at once the greatest of poets and so unnotice- 
able a good citizen as to leave no incidents for biography. 
His material was never far-sought ; (it is still disputed 
whether the fullest head of which we have record were 
cultivated beyond the range of grammar-school prece- 
dent !) but he used it with a poetic instinct which we 
cannot parallel, identified himself with it, yet remained 
always its born and questionless master. He finds the 
Clown and Fool upon the stage, — he makes them the 
tools of his pleasantry, his satire, and even his pathos ; 
he finds a fading rustic superstition, and shapes out of 
it ideal Pucks, Titanias, and Ariels, in whose existence 
statesmen and scholars believe forever. Always poet, he 



SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. • 227 

subjects all to the ends of his art, and gives in Hamlet 
the churchyard ghost, but with the cothurnus on, — the 
messenger of God's revenge against murder ; always 
philosopher, he traces in Macbeth the metaphysics of 
apparitions, painting the shadowy Banquo only on the 
o'erwrought brain of the murderer, and staining the 
hand of his wife-accomplice (because she was the more 
refined and higher nature) with the disgustful blood-spot 
that is not there. We say he had no moral intention, 
for the reason, that, as artist, it was not his to deal with 
the realities, but only with the shows of things ; yet, 
with a temperament so just, an insight so inevitable as 
his, it was impossible that the moral realit}^, which un- 
derlies the mirage of the poet's vision, should not always 
be suggested. His humor and satire are never of the 
destructive kind ; what he does in that way is suggestive 
only, — not breaking bubbles with Thor's hammer, but 
puffing them away with the breath of a Clown, or shiv- 
ering them with the light laugh of a genial cynic. Men 
go about to prove the existence of a God ! Was it a bit 
of phosj)horus, that brain whose creations are so real, 
that, mixing with them, we feel as if we ourselves were 
but fleeting magic-lantern shadows 1 

But higher even than the genius we rate the charac- 
ter of this unique man, and the grand impersonality of 
what he wrote. What has he told us of himself? In 
our self-exploiting nineteenth century, with its melan- 
choly liver-complaint, how serene and high he seems ! 
If he had sorrows, he has made them the woof of ever- 
lasting consolation to his kind ; and if, as poets are wont 
to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its biting 
air did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on 
the many windows of that self-centred and cheerful 
soul. 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTUEIES AGO* 



The history of New England is written imperisbably 
on the face of a continent, and in characters as benefi- 
cent as they are enduring. In the Old Wjorld national 
pride feeds itself with the record of battles and con- 
quests ; — battles which proved nothing and settled 
nothing ; conquests which shifted a boundary on the 
map, and put one ugly head instead of another on the 
coin which the people paid to the tax-gatherer. But 
wherever the New-Englander travels among the sturdy 
commonwealths which have sprung from the seed of the 
Mayflower, churches, schools, colleges, tell him where 
the men of his race have been, or their influence pene- 
trated ; and an intelligent freedom is the monument of 
conquests whose results are not to be measured in square 
miles. Next to the fugitives whom Moses led out of 
Egypt, the little ship-load of outcasts who landed at 
Plymouth two centuries and a half ago are destined to 
influence the future of the world. The spiritual thirst 
of mankind has for ages been quenched at Hebrew foun- 
tains ; but the embodiment in human institutions of 

* History of New England during the Stmrt Dynasty. By John 
GoRTiAM Palfrey. Vol. III. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1864. 
pp. xxii, 648. 

Collections of the IMassachusetts Historical Society. Third Series, 
Vols. IX. and X. Fourth Series, Vols. VI. and VII. 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 229 

truths littered by the Son of man eighteen centuries 
ago Yvas to be mainly the work of Puritan thought 
and Puritan self-devotion. Leave New England out in 
the cold ! While you are plotting it, she sits by every 
fireside in the land where there is piety, culture, and 
free thought, 

"^ Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work, — this is 
the short formula in which we may sum up the teaching 
of the foundei^ of New England, a creed ample enough 
for this life and the next./ If their municipal regula- 
tions smack somewhat of Judaism, yet there can be no 
nobler aim or more practical wisdom than theirs ; for it 
was to make the law of man a living counterpart of the 
law of God, in their highest conception of it. Were 
they too earnest in the strife to save their souls alive % 
That is still the problem which every wise and brave 
man is lifelong in solving. If the Devil take a less 
hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy 
with us as with them ; and if we cannot find it in our 
hearts to break with a gentleman of so much worldly 
wisdom, who gives such admiraMc dinners, and whose 
manners are so perfect, so much liie worse for us. 

Looked at on the outside, Ne\\ England history is dry 
and unpicturesque. There is n.> rustle of silks, no wav- 
ing of plumes, no clink of gulden -sj^urs. Our sympa- 
thies are not awakened by the changeful destinies, the 
rise and fall, of great families, whose doom was in their 
blood. Instead of all this, we have the homespun fates 
of Cephas and Prudence rejK-ated in an infinite series of 
peaceable sameness, and finding Sj;uce enough for record 
in the family Bible ; we have the noise of axe and ham- 
mer and saw, an apotheosis of dogged work, where, re- 
versing the fair^-^tale, nothing is left to luck, and, if 
there be any poetry, it is something that cannot be 
helped, — the waste of the water over the dam. Ex- 



230 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

trinsically, it is prosaic and plebeian ; intrinsically, it is 
poetic and noble ; for it is, perhaps, the most perfect in- 
carnation of an idea the world has ever seen. That idea 
was not to found a democracy, nor to charter the city 
of New Jerusalem by an act of the General Court, as 
gentlemen seem to think whose notions of history and 
human nature rise like an exhalation from the good 
things at a Pilgrim Society dinner. Not in the least. 
They had no faith in the Divine institution of a system 
which gives Teague, because he can dig, as much influ- 
ence as Ralph, because he can think, nor in personal at 
the expense of general freedom. Their view of human 
rights was not so limited that it could not take in hu- 
man relations and duties also. They would have been 
likely to answer the claim, " I am as good as anybody," 
by a quiet " Yes, for some things, but not for others ; as 
good, doubtless, in your place, where all things are good." 
What the early settlers of Massachusetts did intend, 
and what they accomplished, was the founding here of a 
new England, and a better one, where the political super- 
stitions and abuses of the old should never have leave to 
take root. So much, we may say, they deliberately in- 
tended. No nobles, either lay or cleric, no great landed 
estates, and no universal ignorance as the seed-plot of 
vice and unreason ; but an elective magistracy and clergy, 
land for all who would till it, and reading and writing, 
will ye nill ye, instead. Here at last, it would seem, 
simple manhood is to have a chance to play his stake 
against Fortune with honest dice, uncogged by those 
three hoary sharpers, Prerogative, Patriciauism, and 
Priestcraft. Whoever has looked into the pamphlets 
published in England during the Great Rebellion cannot 
but have been struck by the fact, that the principles and 
practice of the Puritan Colony had begun to react with 
considerable force on the mother country ; and the pol- 



J 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 231 

icy of the retrograde party there, after the Restoration, 
in its deahngs with New England, finds a curious par- 
allel as to its motives (time will show whether as to its 
results) in the conduct of the same party towards Amer- 
ica during the last four years.* This influence and this 
fear alike bear witness to the energy of the principles at 
work here. 

We have said that the details of New England his- 
tory were essentially dry and unpoetic. Everything is 
near, authentic, and petty. There is no mist of dis- 
tance to soften outlines, no mirage of tradition to give 
characters and events an imaginative loom. So much 
downright work was perhaps never wrought on the 
earth's surface in the same space of time as during the 
first forty years after the settlement. But mere work 
is unpicturesque, and void of sentiment. Irving in- 
stinctively divined and admirably illustrated in his 
" Knickerbocker " the humorous element which lies in 
this nearness of view, this clear, prosaic daylight of 
modernness, and this poverty of stage properties, which 
makes the actors and the deeds they were concerned in 
seem ludicrously small when contrasted with the semi- 
mythic grandeur in which we have clothed them, as we 
look backward from the crowned result, and fancy a 
cause as majestic as our conception of the effect. There 
was, indeed, one poetic side to the existence otherwise 
so narrow and practical; and to have conceived this, 
however partially, is the one original and American 
thing in Cooper. This diviner glimpse illumines the 
lives of our Daniel Boones, the man of civilization and 
old-world ideas confronted with our forest solitudes, — 
confronted, too, for the first time, with his real self, and 
so led gradually to disentangle the original substance of 
his manhood from the artificial results of culture. Here 

* Written in December, 1864. 



1 



232 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 



was our new Adam of the wilderness, forced to name 
anew, not the visible creation of God, but the invisible 
creation of man, in those forms that lie at the base of 
social institutions, so insensibly moulding personal char- 
acter and controlling individual action. Here is the pro- 
tagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as 
that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don 
Quixote, as romantic in its relation to our homespun 
and plebeian mythus as Arthur in his to the mailed and 
plumed cycle of chivalry. We -do not mean, of course, 
that Cooper's " Leatherstocking " is all this or anything 
like it, but that the character typified in him is ideally 
and potentially all this and more. 

But whatever was poetical in the lives of the early 
New-Englanders had something shy, if not sombre, 
about it. If their natures flowered, it was out of sight, 
like the fern. ■ It was in the practical that they showed 
their true quality, as Englishmen are wont. / It has 
been the fashion lately with a few feeble-minded persons 
to undervalue the New England Puritans, as if they 
were nothing more than gloomy and narrow-minded 
fanatics. But all the charges brought against these 
large-minded and far-seeing men are precisely those which 
a really able fanatic, Joseph de Maistre, lajB at the door 
of Protestantism. Neither a knowledge of human na- 
ture nor of history justifies us in confounding, as is 
commonly done, the Puritans of Old and New England, 
or the English Puritans of the third with those of the 
fifth decade of the seventeenth century. Fanaticism, 
or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only 
powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Estab- 
lish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, 
whether it will or no. A sceptre once put in the hand, 
the grip is instinctive ; and he who is firmly seated in 
authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 233 

the highest lesson of statecraft. From the summit of 
power men no longer turn their eyes upward, but be- 
gin to look about them. Aspiration sees only one side 
of every question ; possession, many. And the English 
Puritans, after their revolution was accomplished, stood 
in even a more precarious position than most successful 
assailants of the prerogative of whatever is to continue 
in being. They had carried a political end by means 
of a religious revival. The fulcrum on which they 
rested their lever to overturn the existing order of things 
(as history always placidly calls the particular forms of 
disorder for the time being) w^as in the soul of man. They 
could not renew the fiery gush of enthusiasm, when 
once the molten metal had begun to stiffen in the mould 
of policy and precedent. / The religious element of Pu- 
ritanism became insensibly merged in the political ; and, 
its one great man taken away, it died, as passions have 
done before, of possession.^ It was one thing to shout 
with Cromwell before the battle of Dunbar, " Now, Lord, 
arise, and let thine enemies be scattered ! " and to snuf- 
fle, ''Rise, Lord, and keep us safe in our benefices, our 
sequestered estates, and our five per cent ! " Puritan- 
ism meant something w^hen Captain Hodgson, riding out 
to battle through the morning mist, turns over the com- 
mand of his troop to a lieutenant, and stays to hear the 
prayer of a cornet, there was " so much of God in it." 
Become traditional, repeating the phrase without the 
spirit, reading the present backward as if it were writ- 
ten in Hebrew, translating Jehovah by " I was " instead 
of " I am," — it was no more like its former self than 
the hollow drum made of Zisca's skin was like the grim 
captain whose soul it had once contained. Yet the change 
was inevitable, for it is not safe to confound the things 
of Caesar with the things of God. Some honest repub- 
licans, like Ludlow, were never able to comprehend the 



234 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

chilling contrast between the ideal aim and the material 
fulfilment, and looked askance on the strenuous reign 
of Oliver, • — that rugged boulder of primitive manhood 
lying lonely there on the dead level of the century, — 
as if some crooked changeling had been laid in the cra- 
dle instead of that fair babe of the Commonwealth they 
had dreamed. Truly there is a tide in the affairs of 
men, but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one 
direction ; and those waves of enthusiasm on whose 
crumbling crests we sometimes see nations lifted for a 
gleaming moment are wont to have a gloomy trough 
before and behind. 

But the founders of New England, though they must 
have sympathized vividly with the struggles and tri- 
umphs of their brethren in the mother country, were 
never subjected to the same trials and temptations, 
never hampered with the same lumber of usages and 
tradition. They were not driven to win power by 
doubtful and desperate ways, nor to maintain it by any 
compromises of the ends which make it worth having. 
From the outset they were builders, without need of 
first pulling down, whether to make room or to provide 
material. For thirty years after the colonization of the 
Bay, they had absolute power to mould as they w^ould 
the character of their adolescent commonwealth. Dur- 
ing this time a whole generation would have grown to 
manhood who knew the Old World only by report, in 
whose habitual thought kings, nobles, and bishops would 
be as far away from all present and practical concern as 
the figures in a fairy-tale, and all whose memories and 
associations, all their unconscious training by eye and 
ear, were New English wholly. Nor were the men whose 
influence was greatest in shaping the framework and the 
policy of the Colony, in any true sense of the word, fa- 
laatics. Enthusiasts, perhaps, they were, but with them 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 235 

the fermentation had never gone farther than the ripe- 
ness of the vinous stage. Disappointment had never 
made it acetous, nor had it ever putrefied into the tur- 
bid zeal of Fifth Monarchism and sectarian whimsej^ 
There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on 
its keel, and saving it from all risk of cranJciiiess, than 
business, /And they were business men, men of facts 
and figures no less than of religious earnestness. The 
sum of two hundred thousand pounds had been invested 
in their undertaking, — a sum, for that time, truly enor- 
mous as the result of private combination for a doubtful 
experiment. That their enterprise might succeed, they 
must show a balance on the right side of the counting- 
house ledger, as well as in their private accounts with 
their own souls. The liberty of praying when and how 
they would, must be balanced with an ability of paying 
when and as they ought./ Nor is the resulting fact in 
this case at variance with the a 2^riori theory. They 
succeeded in making their thought the life and soul of a 
body politic, still powerful, still benignly operative, after 
two centuries ; a thing which no mere fanatic ever did 
or ever will accomplish. Sober, earnest, and thoughtful 
men, it was no Utopia, no New Atlantis, no realization 
of a splendid dream, which they had at heart, but the 
establishment of the divine principle of Authority on 
the common interest and the common consent ; the 
making, by a contribution from the free-will of all, a 
power which should curb and guide the free-will of each 
for the general good. If they were stern in their deal- 
ings with sectaries, it should be remembered that the 
Colony was in fact the private property of the Massa- 
chusetts Company, that unity was essential to its suc-- 
cess, and that John of Leyden had taught them how 
unendurable by the nostrils of honest men is the cor-^ 
ruption of the right of private judgment in the evil and 



236 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

selfish hearts of men when no thorough mental training 
has developed the understanding and given the judg- 
ment its needful means of comparison and correction. 
They knew that liberty in the hands of feeble-minded 
and unreasoning persons (and all the worse if they are 
honest) means nothing more than the supremacy of 
their particular form of imbecility ; means nothing less, 
therefore, than downright chaos, a Bedlam-chaos of 
monomaniacs and bores. What was to be done with men 
and women, who bore conclusive witness to the fall of 
man by insisting on w^alking up the broad-aisle of the 
meeting-house in a costume which that event had put 
forever out of fashion 1 About their treatment of 
witches, too, there has been a great deal of ignorant 
babble. Puritanism had nothing whatever to do with it. 
They acted under a delusion, w^hich, with an exception 
here and there (and those mainly medical men, like 
Wierus and Webster), darkened the understanding of all 
Christendom. Dr. Henry More was no Puritan ; and 
his letter to Glanvil, prefixed to the third edition of the 
"Sadducismus Triumphatus," was written in 1678, only 
fourteen years before the trials at Salem. Bekker's 
"Bezauberte Welt" was published in 1693 ; and in the 
Preface he speaks of the difficulty of overcoming " the 
prejudices in which not only ordinary men, but the 
learned also, are obstinate." In Hathaway's case, 1702, 
Chief-Justice Holt, in charging the jury, expresses no 
disbelief in the possibility of witchcraft, and the indict- 
ment implies its existence. Indeed, the natural reaction 
from the Salem mania of 1692 put an end to belief in 
devilish compacts and demoniac possessions sooner in 
New England than elsewhere. The last we hear of it 
there is in 1720, when Rev. Mr. Turell of Medford de- 
tected and exposed an attempted cheat by two girls. 
Even in 1692, it was the foolish breath of Cotton Mather 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 237 

and others of the clergy that blew the dying embers of 
this ghastly superstition into a flame ; and they were 
actuated partly by a desire to bring about a religious 
revival, which might stay for a while the hastening lapse 
of their own authority, and still more by that credulous 
scepticism of feeble-minded piety which dreads the cut- 
ting away of an orthodox tumor of misbelief, as if the 
life-blood of faith would follow, and w^ould keep even a 
stumbling-block in the way of salvation, if only enough 
generations had tripped over it to make it venerable. 
The witches were condemned on precisely the same 
grounds that in our day led to the condemnation of 
" Essays and Reviews." 

But Puritanism was already in the decline when such 
things were possible. What had been a wondrous and 
intimate experience of the soul, a flash into the very 
crypt and basis of man's nature from the fire of trial, 
had become ritual and tradition. In prosperous times 
the faith of one generation becomes the formality of the 
next. " The necessity of a reformation," set forth by 
order of the Synod which met at Cambridge in 1679, 
though no doubt overstating the case, shows how much 
even at that time the ancient strictness had been loos- 
ened. The country had grown rich, its commerce was 
large, and wealth did its natural work in making life 
softer and more worldly, commerce in deprovincializing 
the minds of those engaged in it. But Puritanism had 
already done its duty. As there are certain creatures 
whose whole being seems occupied with an egg-laying 
errand they are sent upon, incarnate ovipositors, their 
bodies but bags to hold this precious deposit, their legs 
of use only to carry them where they may safeliest be 
rid of it, so sometimes a generation seems to have no 
other end than the conception and ripening of certain 
germs. Its blmd stirrings, its apparently aimless seek- 



238 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

ing hither and thither, are but the driving of an instinct 
to be done with its parturient function toward these prin- 
ciples of future Ufe and power. Puritanism, beheving 
itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, with- 
out knowing it, the egg of democracy. The English 
Puritans pulled down chiirch and state to rebuild Zion 
on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but 
America, they were building. But if their millennium 
went by, like the rest, and left men still human ; if 
they, like so many saints and martyrs before them, lis- 
tened in vain for the sound of that trumpet w^hich was 
to summon all souls to a resurrection from the body of 
this death which men call life, — it is not for us, at least, 
to forget the heavy debt we owe them. It was the drums 
of Naseby and Dunbar that gathered the minute-men on 
Lexington Common ; it was the red dint of the axe on 
Charles's block that marked One in our era. The Puri- 
tans had their faults. They were narrow, ungenial ; 
they could not understand the text, " I have piped to 
you and ye have not danced," nor conceive that saving 
one's soul should be the cheerfullest, and not the dreari- 
est, of businesses. Their preachers had a way, like the 
painful Mr. Perkins, of pronouncing the word dam?i with 
such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in their auditors' 
ears a good while after. And it was natural that men who 
captained or accompanied the exodus from existing forms 
and associations into the doubtful wilderness that led to 
the promised land, should find more to their purpose in 
the Old Testament than in the New. As respects the 
New England settlers, however visionary some of their 
religious tenets may have been, their political ideas sa- 
vored of the realty, and it was no Nephelococcygia of 
which they drew the plan, but of a commonwealth whose 
foundation was to rest on solid and familiar earth. If 
what they did was done in a corner, the results of it 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 239 

were to be felt to the ends of the earth ; and the figure 
of Winthrop should be as venerable in history as that 
of Romulus is barbarously grand in legend. 

I am inclined to think that many of our national char- 
acteristics, which are sometimes attributed to climate 
and sometimes to institutions, are traceable to the influ- 
ences of Puritan descent. We are apt to forget how very 
large a proportion of our population is descended from 
emigrants who came over before 1660. Those emi- 
grants were in great part representatives of that element 
of English character which was most susceptible of re- 
ligious impressions ; in other words, the most earnest 
and imaginative. /Our people still differ from their 
English cousins (as they are fond of calling themselves 
when they are afraid we may do them a mischief ) in a 
certain capacity for enthusiasm, a devotion to abstract 
principle, an openness to ideas, a greater aptness for 
intuitions than for the slow processes of the syllogism, 
and, as derivative from this, in minds of looser texture, 
a light-armed, skirmishing habit of thought, and a posi- 
tive preference of the birds in the bush, — an excellent 
quality of character before you have yoiu' bird in the hand. 

There have been two great distributing centres of the 
English race on this continent, Massachusetts and Vir- 
ginia. Each has impressed the character of its early 
legislators on the swarms it has sent forth. Their ideas 
are in some fundamental respects the opposites of each 
other, and we can only account for it by an antagonism 
of thought beginning with the early framers of their 
respective institutions. New England abolished caste ; 
in Virginia they still talk of " quality folks." But it 
was in making education not only common to all, but in 
some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the 
free republics of America was practically settled. Every 
man was to be trained, not only to the use of arms, but 



240 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

of his wits also ; and it is these which alone make the 
others effective weapons for the maintenance of freedom. 
You may disarm the hands, but not the brains, of a 
people, and to know what should be defended is the first 
condition of successful defence. Simple as it seems, it 
was a great discovery that the key of knowledge could 
turn both ways, that it could open, as well as lock, the 
door of power to the man3\ The only things a New- 
Englander was ever locked out of were the jails. It is 
quite true that our Republic is the heir of the English 
Commonwealth ; but as we trace events backward to 
their causes, we shall find it true also, that what made 
our Revolution a foregone conclusion was that act of the 
General Court, passed in May, 1647, which established 
the system of common schools. " To the end tiiat 
learning may not be buried in the graves of our fore- 
fathers in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord as- 
sisting our endeavors, it is therefore ordered by this 
Court and authority thereof, that every townshi23 in this 
jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to fifty 
householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within 
their towns to teach all such children as shall resort to 
him to write and read." 

Passing through some Massachusetts village, perhaps at 
a distance from any house, it may be in the midst of a 
piece of woods where four roads meet, one may sometimes 
even yet see a small square one-stor}^ building, wdiose use 
would not be long doubtful. It is summer, and the 
flickering shadows of forest-leaves dapple the roof of the 
little porch, whose door stands w^ide, and shows, hanging 
on either hand, rows of straw hats and bonnets, that 
look as if they had done good service. As you pass the 
open windows, joii hear whole platoons of high-pitched 
voices discharging words of two or three syllables wdth 
wonderful precision and unanimity. Then there is a 



mv^ ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 241 

pause, and the voice of the officer in command is heard 
reproving some raw recruit whose vocal musket hung 
fire. Then the drill of the small infantry begins anew, but 
pauses again because some urchin — who agrees with 
Voltaire that the superfluous is a very necessary thing — 
insists on spelling "subtraction" with an s too much. 

If you had the good fortune to be born and bred in 
the Bay State, your mind is thronged with half-sad, 
half-humorous recollections. The a-b abs of little voices 
long since hushed in the mould, or ringing now in the 
pulpit, at the bar, or in the Senate-chamber, come back 
to the ear of memory. You remember the high stool 
on which culprits used to be elevated with the tall paper 
fooFs-cap on their heads, blushing to the ears ; and you 
think with wonder how you have seen them since as 
men climbing the world's penance-stools of ambition 
"without a blush, and gladly giv-ing everything for life's 
caps and bells. And you have pleasanter memories of 
going after pond-lilies, of angling for horn-pouts, — that 
queer bat among the fishes, — of nutting, of walking 
over the creaking snow-crust in winter, when the warm 
breath of every household was curling up silently in the 
keen blue air. You wonder if life has any rewards 
more solid and permanent than the Spanish dollar that 
was hung around 3'our neck to be restored again next day, 
and conclude sadly that it was but too true a prophecy 
and emblem of all worldly success. But your moral- 
izing is broken short off b}' a rattle of feet and the pour- 
ing forth of the whole swarm, — the boys dancing and 
shouting, — the mere effervescence of the fixed air of 
youth and animal spirits uncorked, — the sedater girls in 
confidential twos and threes decanting secrets out of the 
mouth of one cape-bonnet into that of another. Times have 
changed since the jackets and trousers used to draw up 
on one side of the road, and the petticoats on the other, 
11 p 



242 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

to salute with bow and courtesy the white neckcloth of 
the parson or the squire, if it chanced to pass during 
intermission. 

Now this little building, and others like it, were an 
original kind of fortification invented by the founders 
of New England. They are the martello-towers that 
protect our coast. This was the great discovery of our 
Puritan forefathers. They were the first lawgivers who 
saw clearly and enforced practically the simple moral and 
political truth, that knowledge was not an alms to be 
dependent on the chance charity of private men or the 
precarious pittance of a trust-fund, but a sacred debt 
which the Commonwealth owed to every one of her 
children. The opening of the first grammar-school was 
the opening of the first trench against monopoly in 
church and state ; the first row of trammels and pot- 
hooks which the little Shearjashubs and Elkanahs blotted 
and blubbered across their copy-books, was the pream- 
ble to the Declaration of Independence. The men who 
gave every man the chance to become a landholder, who 
made the transfer of land easy, and put knowledge 
within the reach of all, have been called narrow-minded, 
because they were intolerant. But intolerant of what 1 
Of what they believed to be dangerous nonsense, which, 
if left free, would destroy the last hope of civil and re- 
ligious freedom. They had not come here that every 
man might do that which seemed good in his own eyes, 
but in the sight of God. Toleration, moreover, is some- 
thing which is won, not granted. It is the equilibrium 
of neutralized forces. The Puritans had no notion of 
tolerating mischief They looked upon their little com- . 
monwealth as upon their own private estate and home- 
stead, as they had a right to do, and would no more 
allow the Devil's religion of unreason to be preached 
therein, than we should permit a prize-fight in our gar- 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTUEIES AGO. 243 

dens. They were narrow ; in other words they had an 
edge to them, as men that serve in great emergencies 
must ; for a Gordian knot is settled sooner with a sword 
than a beetle. 

The founders of New England are commonly repre- 
sented in the after-dinner oratory of their descendants 
as men "before their time," as it is called; in other 
words, deliberately prescient of events resulting from 
new relations of circumstances, or even from circum- 
stances new in themselves, and therefore altogether alien 
from their own experience. Of course, such a class of 
men is to be reckoned among those non-existent human 
varieties so gi'avely catalogued by the ancient natural- 
ists. If a man could shape his action with reference to 
what should happen a century after his death, surely it 
might be asked of him to call in the help of that easier 
foreknowledge which reaches from one day to the next, 
— a power of prophecy whereof we have no example. I 
do not object to a wholesome pride of ancestry, though a 
little mythical, if it be accompanied with the feeling 
that 7iohlesse oblige, and do not result merely in a placid 
self-satisfaction with our own mediocrity, as if greatness, 
like righteousness, could be imputed. We can pardon it 
even in conquered races, like the Welsh and Irish, who 
make up to themselves for present degradation by ima- 
ginary empires in the past whose boundaries they can 
extend at will, carrying the bloodless conquests of fancy 
over regions laid down upon no map, and concerning 
which authentic history is enviously dumb. Those long 
beadrolls of Keltic kings cannot tyrannize over us, and 
we can be patient so long as our own crowns are un- 
cracked by the shillalah sceptres of their actual repre- 
sentatives. In our own case, it would not be amiss, per- 
haps, if we took warning by the example of Teague 
and Taffy. At least, I think it w^ould be wise in our 



244 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

orators not to put forward so prominently the claim of 
the Yankee to universal dominion, and his intention to 
enter upon it forthwith. If we do our duties as honest- 
ly and as much in the fear of God as our forefathers did, 
we need not trouble ourselves much about other titles to 
empire. The broad foreheads and long heads will win 
the day at last in spite of all heraldry, and it will be 
enough if we feel as keenly as our Puritan founders did 
that those organs of empire ma}^ be broadened and 
lengthened by culture.* That our self-complacency 
should not increase the complacency of outsiders is not 
to be wondered at. As we sometimes take credit to 
ourselves (since all commendation of our ancestry is in- 
direct self-flattery) for what the Puritans fathers never 
were, so there are others who, to gratify a spite against 
their descendants, blame them for not having been what 
they could not be ; namely, before their time in such 
matters as slavery, witchcraft, and the like. The view, 
whether of friend or foe, is equally unhistorical, nay, 
without the faintest notion of all that makes history 
worth having as a teacher. That our grandfathers 
shared in the prejudices of their day is all that m.akes 
them human to us ; and that nevertheless they could 
act bravely and wisely on occasion makes them only the 
more venerable. If certain barbarisms and supersti- 
tions disappeared earlier in New England than else- 
where, not by the decision of exceptionally enlightened 
or humane judges, but by force of public opinion, that 
is the fact that is interesting and instructive for us. I 
never thought it an abatement of Hawthorne's genius that 
he came lineally from one who sat in judgment on the 
witches in 1692 ; it was interesting rather to trace some- 

* It is curious, that, when Cromwell proposed to transfer a colony 
from New England to Ireland, one of the conditions insisted on iu 
Massachusetts was that a collefre should be established. 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 245 

thing liereditary in the sombre character of his imagina- 
tion, continually vexing itself to account for the origin 
of evil, and baffled for want of that simple solution in a 
personal Devil. 

But I have no desire to discuss the merits or de- 
merits of the Puritans, having long ago learned the wis- 
dom of saving my sympathy for more modern objects 
than Hecuba. My object is to direct the attention of 
my readers to a collection of documents where they may 
see those worthies as they were in their daily living and 
thinking. The collections of our various historical and 
antiquarian societies can hardly be said to be published 
in the strict sense of the word, and few consequently are 
aware how much they contain of interest for the general 
reader no less than the special student. The several 
volumes of '' Winthrop Papers," in especial, are a mine 
of entertainment. Here we have the Puritans painted 
by themselves, and, w^hile we arrive at a truer notion of 
the characters of some among them, and may according- 
ly sacrifice to that dreadful superstition of being use- 
fully employed which makes so many bores and bored, 
we can also furtively enjoy the oddities of thought and 
speech, the humors of the time, which our local histo- 
rians are too apt to despise as inconsidered trifles. For 
myself I confess myself heretic to the established the- 
ory of the gravity of history, and am not displeased 
with an opportunity to smile behind my hand at any 
ludicrous interruption of that sometimes wearisome cere- 
monial. I am not sure that I would not sooner give 
up Raleigh spreading his cloak to keep the royal Dian's 
feet from the mud, than that awful judgment upon the 
courtier whose Atlantean thighs leaked away in bran 
through the rent in his trunk-hose. The painful fact 
that Fisher had his head cut off is somewhat mitigated 
to me by the circumstance that the Pope should have 



246 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

sent liiin, of all things in the world, a cardinal's hat after 
that incapacitation. Theology herself becomes less un- 
amiable to me when I find the Supreme Pontiff writing 
to the Council of Trent that "they should begin with 
original sin, maintaining yet a due respect for the Em- 
peror^ That infallibility should thus courtesy to de- 
corum, shall make me think better of it while I live. 
I shall accordingly endeavor to give my readers what 
amusement I can, leaving it to themselves to extract 
solid improvement from the volumes before us, which in- 
clude a part of the correspondence of three generations 
of Winthrops. 

Let me premise that there are two men above all 
others for whom our respect is heightened by these let- 
ters, — the elder John Winthrop and Roger Williams. 
Winthrop appears throughout as a truly magnanimous 
and noble man in an unobtrusive way, — a kind of great- 
ness that makes less noise in the world, but is on the 
whole more solidly satisfying than most others, — a man 
who has been dipped in the river of God (a surer bap- 
tism than Styx or dragon's blood) till his character is of 
perfect proof, and who appears plainly as the very soul 
and life of the young Colony. Very reverend and godly 
he truly was, and a respect not merely ceremonious, but 
personal, a respect that savors of love, shows itself in 
the letters addressed to him. Charity and tolerance 
flow so naturally from the pen of Williams that it is 
plain they were in his heart. He does not show himself 
a very strong or very wise man, but a thoroughly gentle 
and good one. His affection for the two Winthrops is 
evidently of the warmest. We suspect that he lived to 
see that there was more reason in the drum-head relig- 
ious discipline which made him, against his will, the 
founder of a commomvealth, than he may have thought 
at first. But for the fanaticism (as it is the fashion to 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 247 

call the sagacious straitness) of the abler men who knew 
how to root the English stock firmly in this new soil on 
either side of him, his little plantation could never have 
existed, and he himself would have been remembered 
only, if at all, as one of the jarring atoms in a chaos of 
otherwise-mindedness. 

Two other men, Emanuel Downing and Hugh Peter, 
leave a positively unpleasant savor in the nostrils. Each 
is selfish in his own way, — Downing with the shrewd- 
ness of an attorney, Peter with that clerical unction 
which in a vulgar nature so easily degenerates into 
greasiness. Neither of them was the man for a forlorn 
hope, and both returned to England when the civil war 
opened prospect of preferment there. Both, we suspect, 
were inclined to value their Puritanism for its rewards 
in this world rather than the next. Downing's son, Sir 
George, was basely prosperous, making the good cause 
pay him so long as it was solvent, and then selling out 
in season to betray his old commander, Colonel Okey, 
to the shambles at Charing Cross. Peter became a colo- 
nel in the Parliament's army, and under the Protecto- 
rate one of Cromwell's chaplains. On his trial, after 
the Restoration, he made a poor figure, in striking con- 
trast to some of the brave men who suffered with him. 
At his execution a shocking brutality was shown. 
" When Mr Cook was cut down and brought to be quar- 
tered, one they called Colonel Turner calling to the 
Sheriflf's men to bring Mr Peters near, that he might 
see it ; and by and by the Hangman came to him all 
besmeared in blood, and rubbing his bloody hands to- 
gether, he tauntingly asked. Come, how do you like this, 
Mr. Peters ? How do you like this work V * This Colo- 

* State Trials, II. 409. One would not reckon too closely with a 
man on trial for his life, but there is something pitiful in Peter's repre- 
ponting himself as coming back to England " out of the West Indias," 
in order to evade any complicity with suspected New England. 



248 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

nel Turner can hardly have been other than the one 
who four years later came to the hangman's hands for 
robbery ; and whose behavior, both in the dock and at 
the gallows, makes his trial one of the most entertain- 
ing as a display of character. Peter would seem to 
have been one of those men gifted with what is some- 
times called eloquence ; that is, the faculty of stating 
things powerfully from momentary feeling, and not from 
that conviction of the higher reason which alone can 
give force and permanence to words. His letters show 
him subject, like others of like temperament, to fits of 
" hypocondriacal melancholy," and the only witness he 
called on his trial was to prove that he was confined to 
his lodgings by such an attack on the day of the king's 
beheading. He seems to have been subject to this mal- 
ady at convenience, as some women to hysterics. Hon- 
est John Endicott plainly had small confidence in him, 
and did not think him the right man to re23resent the 
Colony in England. There is a droll resolve in the 
Massachusetts records by which he is " desired to write 
to Holland for 500/. worth of ^x^tey^ & 40/. worth of 
match." It is with a match that we find him burning 
his fingers in the present correspondence. 

Peter seems to have entangled himself somehow with 
a Mrs. Deliverance Shefiield, whether maid or widow no- 
where appears, but presumably the latter. The follow- 
ing statement of his position is amusing enough : " I 
have sent Mrs D. Sh. letter, which puts mee to new 
troubles, for though shee takes liberty upon my Cossen 
Downing's speeches, yet (Good Sir) let mee not be a foole 
in Israel. I had many good answers to yesterday's worke 
[a- Fast] and amongst the rest her letter ; which (if her 
owne) doth argue more wisedome than I thought shee 
had. You have often sayd I could not leave her ; what 
to doe is very considerable. Could I with comfort & 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 249 

credit desist, this seemes best : could I goe on & content 

myselfe, that were good For though I now 

seeme free agayne, yet the depth I know not. Had 
shee come over with me, I thinke I had bin quieter. 
This shee may know, that I have sought God earnestly, 
that the nexte weeke I shall bee riper : — I doubt shee 
gaynes most by such writings : & shee deserves most 
where shee is further of. If you shall amongst jo\i 
advise mee to write to hir, I shall forthwith ; our towne 
lookes upon mee contracted & so I have sa^^d mjselfe ; 
what wonder the charge [change 1] would make, I know 
not." Again : " Still pardon my offensive boldnes : I 
know not well whither Mrs Sh. have set mee at liberty 
or not : my conclusion is, that if 3"0u find I cannot 
make an honorable retreat, then I shall desire to ad- 
vance avv Qe(o. Of you I now expect your last advise, 
viz : whither I must goe on or of, sahio evangelij hoiiore : 
if shee bee in good earnest to leave all agitations this 
way, then I stand still & wayt God's mind concerning 

mee If I had much mony I would part with it 

to her free, till wee heare what England doth, supposing 
I may bee called to some imployment that will not suit 
a marryed estate " : (here another mode of escajDC pre- 
sents itself, and he goes on :) " for indeed (Sir) some must 
looke out & I have very strong thouglits to speake with the 
Duitch Governor & lay some way there for a supply &c." 
At the end of the letter, an objection to the lady herself 
occurs to him : " Once more for Mrs Sh : I had from Mr 
Hibbins & others, her fellowpassengers, sad discourage- 
ments where they saw her in her trim. I would not 
come of with dishonor, nor come on with griefe, or omi- 
nous hesitations." On all this shilly-shally we have a 
shrewd comment in a letter of Endicott : " I cannot but 
acquaint you with my thoughts concerning Mr Peter 
since hee receaued a letter from Mrs Sheffield, which 
11* 



250 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

was yesterday in the eveninge after the Fast, shee seem- 
ina: in her letter to abate of her affeccions towards him 
& disHkinge to come to Salem vppon such termes as he 
had written. I finde now that hee begins to play her 
parte, & if I mistake not, you will see him as greatly 
in loue with her (if shee will but hold of a little) as 
euer shee was with him ; but he conceales it what he 
can as yett. The begininge of the next weeke you 
will heare further from him." The widow was evidently 
more than a match for poor Peter. 

It should appear that a part of his trouble arose from 
his having coquetted also with a certain Mrs. Ruth, 
about whom he was " dealt with by Mrs Amee, Mr 
Phillips & 2 more of the Church, our Elder being one. 
When Mr Phillips with much violence & sharpnes 
charged mee home .... that I should hinder the 
mayd of a match at London, which was not so, could 
not thinke of any kindnes I euer did her, though shee 
haue had above 300^i. through my fingers, so as if God 
uphold me not after an especiall manner, it will sinke me 
surely .... hee told me he would not stop my in- 
tended marriage, but assured mee it would not bee 
good .... all which makes mee reflect upon my rash 
proceedings with Mrs Sh." Panurge's doubts and dif- 
ficulties about matrimony were not more entertainingly 
contradictory. Of course, Peter ends by marrying the 
widow, and presently we have a comment on " her trim." 
In January, 1639, he writes to Winthrop : "My wife 
is very thankfull for her apples, & desires much the new 
fashioned shooes." Eight years later we find him writ- 
ing from England, where he had been two years : " I am 
coming over if I must ; my wife comes of necessity to 
New England, having run her selfe out of breath here " ; 
and then in the postscript, " bee sure you never let my 
wife come away from thence without my leave, & then 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTUEIES AGO. 251 

you love mee." But life is never pure comedy, and the 
end in this case is tragical. Roger Williams, after his 
return from England in 1654, writes to John Win- 
throp, Jr. : " Your brother flourisheth in good esteeme 
& is eminent for maintaining the Freedome of the Con- 
science as to matters of Beliefe, Religion, & Worship. 
Your Father Peters preacheth the same Doctrine though 
not so zealously as some years since, yet cries out against 
New English Rigidities & Persecutions, their civil in- 
juries & wrongs to himselfe, & their unchristian dealing 
with him in excommunicating his distracted wife. All 
this he tould me in his lodgings at Whitehall, those 
lodgings which I was tould were Canterburies [the Arch- 
bishop], but he himselfe tould me that that Library 
wherein we were together was Canterburies & given him 
by the Parliament. His wife lives from him, not wholy but 
much distracted. He tells me he had but 200 a yeare & 
he allowed her 4 score per annum of it. Surely, Sir, the 
most holy Lord is most wise in all the trialls he exercis- 
eth his people with. He tould me that his affliction 
from his wife stird him np to Action abroad, & when 
successe tempted him to Pride, the Bitternes in his 
bozome-comforts was a Cooler & a Bridle to him." Tru- 
ly the whirligig of time brings about strange revenges. 
Peter had been driven from England by the persecu- 
tions of Laud ; a few years later he " stood armed on 
the scaffold " when that prelate was beheaded, and now 
we find him installed in the archiepiscopal lodgings. 
Dr. Palfrey, it appears to me, gives altogether too favor- 
able an opinion both of Peter's character and abilities. 
I conceive him to have been a vain and selfish man. 
He may have had the bravery of passionate impulse, but 
he wanted that steady courage of character which has such 
a beautiful constancy in Winthrop. He always professed 
a longing to come back to New England, but it was only 



252 NEW ENGLAKD TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

a way he had of talking. That he never meant to come 
is plain from these letters. Nay, when things looked 
prosperous in England, he writes to the younger Win- 
throp : " My counsell is you should come hither with 
your family for certaynly you will bee capable of a com- 
fortable living in this free Commonwealth. I doo seri- 
ously advise it G. Downing is worth 500/. per 

annum but 4/. per diem — your brother Stephen worth 
2000/. & a maior. I pray come." But when he is 
snugly ensconced in Whitehall, and may be presumed 
to have some influence with the prevailing powers, his 
zeal cools. " I wish you & all friends to stay there & 
rather looke to the West Indyes if they remoue, for 
many are here to seeke when they come ouer." To me 
Peter's highest promotion seems to have been that he 
walked with John Milton at the Protector's funeral. He 
was, I suspect, one of those men, to borrow a charita- 
ble phrase of Roger Williams, who " feared God in the 
main," that is, whenever it was not personally incon- 
venient. William Coddington saw him in his glory in 
1G51 : "Soe wee toucke the tyme to goe to viset Mr 
Petters at his chamber. I was mery with him & called 
him the Arch Bp : of Cantei-berye, in regard to his ad- 
tendance by ministers & gentlemen, & it passed very 
well." Considering certain charges brought against Pe- 
ter, (though he is said, when under sentence of death, 
to have denied the truth of them,) Coddington's state- 
ment that he liked to have " gentlewomen waite of 
him" in his lodgings has not a pleasant look. One last 
report of him we get (September, 1659) in a letter of 
John Davenport, — " that ]\Ir Hugh Peters is distracted 
& under sore horrors of conscience, crying out of him- 
selfe as damned & confessing haynous actings." 

Occasionally these letters give us interesting glimj)ses 
of persons and things in England. In the letter of Wil- 



KEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 253 

liams.just cited, there is a lesson for all parties raised to 
power by exceptional causes. " Surely, Sir, youre Fa- 
ther & all tlie people of God in England .... are now 
in the sadle & at the helme, so high that non datus 
descensus nisi cadendo : Some cheere up their spirits with 
the impossibilitie of another fall or turne, so doth Major 
G. Harrison .... a very gallant most deserving heav- 
enly man, but most highfiowne for the Kingdom of the 
Saints & the 5th Monarchie now risen & their sun never 
to set againe &c. Others, as, to my knowledge, the Pro- 
tector .... are not so full of that faith of miracles, 
but still imagine changes & persecutions & the very 
slaughter of the witnesses before that glorious morning 
so much desired of a worldly Kingdome, if ever such a 
Kingdome (as literally it is by so many expounded) be 
to arise in this present world & dispensation." Poor 
General Harrison lived to be one of the witnesses so 
slauglitered. The practical good sense of Cromwell is 
worth noting, the English understanding struggling 
against Judaic trammels. Williams gives us another 
peep through the keyhole of the past : " It pleased the 
Lord, to call me for some time & with some persons to 
practice the Hebrew, the Greeke, Latine, French & 
Dutch. The secretarie of the Councell (Mr Milton) for 
my Dutch I read him, read me many more languages. 
Grammar rules begin to be esteemed a Tyrannic. I 
taught 2 young Gentlemen, a Parliament man's sons, as 
we teach our children English, by w^ords, phrazes, & 
constant talke, &c." It is plain that Milton had talked 
over with Williams the theory put forth in his tract on 
Education, and made a convert of him. We could wish 
that the good Baptist had gone a little more into par- 
ticulars. But which of us knows among the men he 
meets whom time will dignify by curtailing him of the 
" Mr.," and reducing him to a bare patronymic, as being 



254 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

a kind by himself 1 We have a glance or two at Oliver, 
who is always interesting. " The late renowned Oliver 
eonfest to me in close discourse about the Protestants 
affaires &c that he yet feard great persecutions to the 
protestants from the Romanists before the downfall of 
the Papacie," writes Williams in 1660. This "close 
discourse " must have been six years before, when Wil- 
liams was in England. Within a year after, Oliver inter- 
fered to some purpose in behalf of the Protestants of 
Piedmont, and Mr. Milton wrote his famous sonnet. Of 
the war with Spain, Williams reports from his letters out 
of England in 1656 : " This diversion against the Span- 
iard hath tiu-nd the face & thoughts of many English, so 
that the saying now is, Crowne the Protector with gould,* 
though the sullen yet cry, Crowne him with thornes." 

Again in 1654: " I know the Protector had strong 
thoughts of Hispaniola & Cuba. Mr Cotton's interpret- 
ing of Euphrates to be the West Indies, the supply of 
gold (to take off taxes), &, the provision of a warmer 
diverticulum <h receptaculum then N. England is, will 
make a footing into those parts very precious, & if it 
shall please God to vouchsafe successe to this fleete, I 
looke to hear of an invitation at least to these parts for 
removall from his Highnes who lookes on N. E. only with 
an eye of pitie, as poore, cold & useless." The mixture 
of Euphrates and taxes, of the transcendental and prac- 
tical, prophecy taking precedence of thrift, is character- 
istic, and recalls Cromwell's famous rule, of fearing God 
and keeping your powder dry. In one of the Protector's 
speeches,! he insists much on his wish to retire to a pri- 
vate life. There is a curious confirmation of his sincerity 
in a letter of William Hooke, then belonging to his 

* Waller put this into verse : — 

" Let the rich ore forthwith be melted down 
And the state fixed by making him a crown." 
t The third in Carlyle, 1654. 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 255 

household, dated the 13th of AjDril, 1657. The question 
of the kingly title was then under debate, and Hooke's 
account of the matter helps to a clearer understanding 
of the reasons for Cromwell's refusing the title : " The 
protector is urged utrinque & (I am ready to think) will- 
ing enough to betake himself to a private life, if it 
might be. He is a godly man, much in prayer & good 
discourses, delighting in good men & good ministers, 
self-denying & ready to promote any good work for 
Christ."* On the 5th of February, 1654, Captain John 
Mason, of Pequot memory, writes " a word or twoe of 
newes as it comes from Mr Eaton, viz : that the Parlia- 
ment sate in September last ; they chose their old 
Speaker & Clarke. The Protectour told them they were 
a free Parliament, & soe left them that day. They, 
considering where the legislative power resided, con- 
cluded to vote it on the morrow, '& t'5'J:ake charge of the 
militia. The Protectour hereing of i\ sent for some 
numbers of horse, went to the Parliament House, nayld 
up the doores, sent for them to the Fainted Chamber, 
told them they should attend th^' lawes established, & 
that he would wallow in his bloodf before he would part 
with what was conferd upon hijm, Uendering them an 
oath : 140 engaged." Now it is cumous that Mr. Eaton 
himself, from whom Mason got hi^ news, wrote, only 
two days before, an account, differing, in sqme particulars, 
and especially in tone, from Mason's. \ On the speech he 
says, that it "gave such satisfactionV that about 200 
have since ingaged to owne the presem; f&overnment." 
Yet Carlyle gives the same number of sigr^rs (140) as 
Masonj and there is a sentence in CromweU\speech, as 
reported by Carlyle, of precisely the same jmrport as 
that quoted by Mason. To me, that " wallow in my 
blood " has rather more of the Cromwellian ring in it, 

* CoUections, Third Series, Vol. I. p. 182. 



256 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 



more of the quality of spontaneous speech, than the 
" rolled into my grave and buried with infamy " of the 
official reporter. John Haynes (24th July^ 1G53) re- 
ports " newes from England of astonishing nature," con- 
cerning the dissolution of the Rump. We quote his 
story both as a contemporaneous version of the event, 
and as containing some particulars that explain the 
causes that led to it. It differs, in some respects, 
from Carlyle, and is hardly less vivid as a picture : 
" The Parliament of England & Councell of State are 
both dissolved, by whom & the manner this : The Lord 
Cromwell, Generall, went to the house & asked the 
Speaker & Bradshaw by what power they sate ther. 
They answ^ered by the same power that he woare his 
sword. Hee replied they should know they did not, & 
said they should sitt noe longer, demanding an account 
of the vast sommes of money they had received of the 
Commons. They said the matter was of gi'eat conse- 
quence & they would give him accompt in tenn dayes. He 
said, Noe, they had sate too long already (& might now 
take their ease,) for ther inriching themselves & impov- 
erishing the Commons, & then seazed uppon all the 
Records. Immediatly Lambert, Livetenant Generall, & 
Hareson Maior Generall (for they two were with him), 
tooke the Speaker Lenthall by the hands, lift him out 
of the Chaire, & ledd him out of the house, & com- 
manded the rest to depart, which fortwith was obeied, & 
the Generall tooke the keyes & locked the doore." He 
then goes on to give the reasons assigned by different 
persons for the act. Some said that the General 
*' scented their purpose " to declare themselves perpet- 
ual, and to get rid of him by ordering him to Scotland. 
" Others say this, that the cries of the oppressed pre- 
veiled much with him .... & hastned the declaracion 
of that ould principle, Salus populi suprema lex &c." 




NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 257 

The General, in the heat of his wrath, himself snatching 
the keys and locking the door, has a look of being drawn 
from the life. Cromwell, in a letter to General Fortescue 
(November, 1655), speaks sharply of the disorders and 
debanchedness, profaneness and wickedness, commonly 
practised amongst the army sent ont to the West Indies. 
Major Mason gives us a specimen : " It is heere reported 
that some of the soldiers belonging to the fiieet at Bos- 
ton, fPell npon the watch : after some bickering they 
comanded them to goe before the Governour ; they re- 
torned that they were Cromwell's bo3'es." Have we not, 
in these days, heard of " Sherman's boys " 1 

Belonging properly to the " Winthrop Papers," but 
printed in an earlier volume (Third Series, Vol. I. pp. 
185 - 198), is a letter of John Maidstone, which contains 
the best summary of the Civil War that I ever read. 
Indeed, it gives a clearer insight into its causes, and a 
better view of the vicissitudes of the Commonwealth 
and Protectorate, than any one of the more elaborate 
histories. There is a singular equity and absence of 
party passion in it which gives us faith in the author's 
judgment. He was Oliver's Steward of the Household, 
and his portrait of him, as that of an eminently fair- 
minded man who knew him well, is of great value. 
Carlyle has not copied it, and, as many of my readers 
may never have seen it, I reproduce it here : " Before 
I pass further, pardon me in troubling you with the 
character of his person, which, by reason of my near- 
ness to him, I had opportunity well to observe. His 
body was well compact and strong ; his stature under 
six feet, (I believe about two inches ;) his head so shaped 
as you might see it a store-house and shop both, of a 
vast treasury of natural parts. His temper exceeding 
fiery, as I have known, but the flame of it kept down 
for the most part or soon allayed with those moral en- 



258 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

dowments he had. He was naturally compassionate to 
wards objects in distress, even to an effeminate measure ; 
though God had made him a heart wherein was left little 
room for any fear but what was. due to himself, of which ■ 
there was a large proportion, yet did he exceed in ten- 
derness toward sufferers. A larger soul, I think, hath 
seldom dwelt in a house of clay than his was. I do be- 
lieve, if his story were impartially transmitted, and the 
unprejudiced world well possessed with it, she would add 
him to her nine worthies and make that number a 
decemviri. He lived and died in comfortable communion 
with God, as judicious persons near him well observed. ■ 
He was that Mordecai that sought the welfare of his 
people and spake peace to his seed. Yet were his temp- 
tations such, as it appeared frequently that he that hath 
grace enough for many men may have too little for him- 
self, the treasure he had being but in an earthen vessel 
and that equally defiled with original sin as any other 
man's nature is." There are phrases here that may be 
matched with the choicest in the life of Agricola ; and, 
indeed, the whole letter, superior to Tacitus in judicial 
fairness of tone, goes abreast of his best writing in con- 
densation, nay, surpasses it in this, that, while in Taci- 
tus the intensity is of temper, here it is the clear resid- 
uum left by the ferment and settling of thought. Just 
before, speaking of the dissolution of Oliver's last Par- 
liament, Maidstone says : " That was the last which sat 
during his life, he being compelled to wrestle with the 
difficulties of his place so well as he could without par- 
liamentary assistance, and in it met with so great a 
burthen as (I doubt not to say) it drank up his spirits, 
of which his natural constitution yielded a vast stock, 
and brought him to his grave, his interment being the 
seed-time of his glory and England's calamity." Hooke, 
in a letter of April 16, 1658, has a passage worth quot- 



I 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 259 

ing : " The dissoliicion of the last Parliament puts the 
supreme powers upon difficulties, though the trueth is 
the Nacion is so ill spirited that little good is to be ex- 
pected from these Generall Assemblies. They [the su- 
preme powers, to wit, Cromwell] have been much in 
Counsell since this disappointment, & God hath been 
sought by them in the effectuall sense of the need of 
hel23 from heaven & of the extreme danger impendent 
on a miscarriage of their advises. But our expences are 
so vast that I know not how they can avoyde a recur- 
rence to another Session & to make a further tryall. 
.... The land is full of discontents, & the Cavaleerish 
party doth still expect a day & nourish hopes of a Revo- 
lucion. The Quakers do still proceed & are not yet 
come to their period. The Presbyterians do abound, I 
thinke, more than ever, & are very bold & confident 
because some of their masterpieces lye unanswered, 
particularly theire t/w5 Diviiium Regiminis Ecclesiastici 
which I have sent to Mr. Davenporte. It hath been ex- 
tant without answer these many years [only four, brother 
Hooke, if we may trust the title-page]. The Anabap- 
tists abound likewise, & Mr Tombes hath pretended to 
have answered all the bookes extant against his opinion. 
I saw him presenting it to the Protectour of late. The 
Episcopall men ply the Common-Prayer booke with 
much more boldness then ever since these turnes of 
things, even in the open face of the City in severall 
places. I haA^e spoken of it to the Protectour but as 
yet nothing is done in order to their being suppressed." 
It should teach us to distrust the apparent size of ob- 
jects, which is a mere cheat of their nearness to us, that 
we are so often reminded of how small account things 
seem to one generation for which another was ready to 
die. A copy of the Jus Divinum held too close to the 
eyes could shut out the universe with its infinite 



2G0 KEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

chances and changes, its splendid indifference to our 
ephemeral fates. Cromwell, we should gather, had 
found out the secret of this historical perspective, to dis- 
tinguish between the blaze of a burning tar-barrel and 
the final conflagration of all things. He had learned 
tolerance by the possession of power, — a proof of his 
capacity for rule. In 1652 Haynes writes : " Ther was 
a Catechise lately in print ther, that denied the divinity 
of Christ, yett ther was motions in the house by some, 
to have it lycenced by authority. Cromwell mainly 
oposed, & at last it was voted to bee burnt which causes 
much discontent of somme." Six years had made 
Cromwell wiser. 

One more extract from a letter of Hooke's (30th 
March, 1659) is w^orth giving. After speaking of Oli- 
ver's death, he goes on to say : " Many prayers were 
put up solemnly for his life, & some, of great & good 

note, were too confident that he would not die I 

suppose himselfe had thoughts that he should have 
outlived this sickness till near his dissolution, perhaps a 
day or two before ; w^hich I collect partly by some 
words which he was said to speak .... & partly from 
his delaying, almost to the last, to nominate his succes- 
sor, to the wonderment of many who began sooner to 

despair of his life His eldest son succeedeth him, 

being chosen by the Council, the day following his 
father's death, whereof he had no expectation. I have 
heard him say he had thought to have lived as a country 
gentleman, & that his father had not employed him in 
such a way as to prepare him for such employment ; 
which, he thou.ght, he did designedly. I suppose his 
meaning was lest it should have been apprehended he 
had prepared & appointed him for such a place, the bur- 
then whereof I have several times heard him complain- 
ing under since his coming to the Government, the 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 261 

weighty occasions whereof with continuall oppressing 
cares had drunk up his father's spirits, in whose body 
very Uttle blood was found when he was opened : the 
greatest defect visible was in his heart, which was flac- 
cid & shrunk together. Yet he was one that could bear 
much without complaining, as one of a strong constitution 
of brain (as appeared when he was dissected) & likewise 
of bod}^. His son seemeth to be of another frame, soft 
& tender, & penetrable with easier cares by much, yet 
he is of a sweete countenance, vivacious & candid, as is 
the whole frame of his spirit, only naturally inclined to 
choler. His reception of multitudes of addresses from 
towns, cities, & counties doth declare, among several 
other indiciums, more of ability in him than could, ordi- 
narily, have been expected fi'om him. He spake also 
with general acceptation & applause when he made his 
speech before the Parliament, even far beyond the Lord 
Fynes.* .... If this Assembly miss it, we are like to 
be in an ill condition. The old ways & customs of Eng- 
land, as to worshipe, are in the hearts of the most, who 

long to see the days again which once they saw 

The hearts of very many are for the house of the Stew- 
arts, & there is a speech as if they would attempt to 

call the late King's judges into question The 

city, I hear is full of Cavaliers." Poor Richard appears 
to have inherited little of his father but the inclination 
to choler. That he could speak far beyond the Lord 
Fynes seems to have been not much to the purpose. 
Khetoric was not precisely the medicine for such a case 
as he had to deal with. Such were the glimpses which 
the New England had of the Old. Ishmael must ere- 
long learn to shift for himself. 

The temperance question agitated the fathers very 
much as it still does the children. We have never seen 

* This speecli may be found in the Annual Register of 1762. 



262 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

the anti-prohibition argument stated more cogently than 
in a letter of Thomas Shepard, minister of Cambridge, 
to Winthrop, in 1G39 : " This also I doe humbly intreat, 
that there may be no sin made of dj^inhing in any case 
one to another, for T am confident he that stands here 
will fall & be beat from his grounds by his own argu- 
ments ; as also that the consequences will be very sad, 
and the thing provoking to God & man to make more 
sins than (as yet is scene) God himself hath made." A 
principle as wise now as it was then. Oiu- ancestors 
were also harassed as much as we by the difficvilties of 
domestic service. In a country where land might be 
had for the asking, it was not easy to keep hold of ser- 
vants brought over from England. Emanuel Downing, 
always the hard, practical man, would find a remedy in 
negro slavery. " A warr with the Narraganset," he 
writes to Winthrop in 1645, "is verie considerable to 
this plantation, ffor I doubt whither it be not synne 
in us, having power in our hands, to suffer them to 
maynteyne the worship of the devill which their paw- 
wawes often doe ; 21ie, If upon a just warre the Lord 
should deliver them into our hands, w^ee might easily 
have men, woemen, & children enough to exchange 
for Moores, which wilbe more gaynefull pilladge for us 
than wee conceive, for I doe not see how wee can thrive 
untill wee gett into a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all 
our buisenes, for our childrens children will hardly see 
this great Continent filled with people, soe that our ser- 
vants will still desire freedome to plant for them selves, 
& not stay but for verie great wages. And I suppose 
you know verie well how wee shall maynteyne 20 Moores 
cheaper than one Englishe servant." The doubt wheth- 
er it be not sin in us longer to tolerate their devil-wor- 
ship, considering how much need we have of them as 
merchandise, is delicious. The way in which Hugh Pe- 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 263 

ter gi'ades the sharp descent from the apostoHc to the 
practical with an et cetera, in the following extract, has 
the same charm : " Sir, Mr Endecot & myself salute 
you in the Lord Jesus &c. Wee have heard of a divi- 
dence of women & children in the bay & would bee glad 
of a share viz : a young woman or girle & a boy if you 
tliinke good." Peter seems to have got what he asked 
for, and to have been worse off than before ; for we find 
him writing two years later : " My wife desires my 
daughter to send to Hanna that was her mayd, now at 
Charltowne, to know if shee would dwell with us, for 
truly wee are so destitute (having now but an Indian) 
that wee know not what to doe." Let any housewife of 
our day, who does not find the Keltic element in domestic 
life so refreshing as to Mr. Arnold in literature, imagine 
a household with one wild Pequot woman, communi- 
cated with by signs, for its maid of all work, and take 
courage. Those were serious times indeed, when your 
cook might give warning by taking your scalp, or chignon, 
as the case might be, and making off with it into the 
woods. /The fewness and dearness. of servants made it 
necessary to call in temporary assistance for extraordi- 
nary occasions, and hence arose the common use of the 
word help. As the great majority kept no servants at 
all, and yet were liable to need them for work to which 
the family did not suffice, as, for instance, in harvest, 
the use of the word was naturally extended to all kinds 
of service. That it did not have its origin in any false 
shame at the condition itself, induced by democratic 
habits, is plain from the fact that it came into use while 
the word servant had a much wider application than now, 
and certainly implied no social stigma. Downing and 
Hooke, each at different times, one of them so late as 
1667, wished to place a son as ''servant" with one of 
the Winthrops. Roger Williams writes of his daughter. 



264 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

that *'she desires to spend some time in service & liked 
much Mrs Brenton, who wanted."/ This was, no doubt, 
in order to be well drilled in housekeeping, an example 
which might be followed still to advantage. John Tink- 
er, himself the " servant " or steward of the second 
Winthrop, makes use of help in both the senses we have 
mentioned, and shows the transition of the word from 
its restricted to its more general application. " We 
have fxllen a pretty deal of timber &; drawn some by 
Goodman Rogers's team, but unless your worship have 
a good team of your own <fe a man to go with them, I 
shall be much distracted for help .... & when our 
business is most in haste we shall be most to seek." 
Again, writing at harvest, as appears both by the date and 
by an elaborate pun, — "I received the sithes you sent 
but in that there came not also yourself, it maketh me 
to sir/th,''^ — he says : " Help) is scarce and hard to get, 
difficult to please, uncertain, &c. Means runneth out k, 
wages on & I cannot make choice of my help.''"' 

It may be some consolation to know that the com- 
plaint of a decline in the quality of servants is no mod- 
ern thing. Shakespeare makes Orlando say to Adam : 

" 0, good old man, how well in thee appears 
The constant service of the antique world, 
When service sweat for duty, not for meed! 
Thou art not of the fashion of these times, 
When none will sweat but for promotion." 

When the faithful old servant is brought upon the stage, 
we may be sure he was getting rare. A century later, 
we have explicit testimony that things were as bad in 
this respect as they are now. Don Manuel Gonzales, 
who travelled in England in 1730, says of London ser- 
vants : "As to common menial servants, they have 
great wages, are well kept and cloathed, but are notwith- 
standing the plague of almost every house in town. 
They form themselves into societies or rather confeder- 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 265 

acies, contributing to the maintenance of each other 
when out of place, and if any of them cannot manage 
the family where they are entertained, as they please, 
immediately they give notice they will be gone. There 
is no speaking to them, they are above correction, and 
if a master should attempt it, he may expect to be 
handsomely drubbed by the creature he feeds and har- 
bors, or perhaps an action brought against him for it. 
It is become a common saying, If my servant heiiH a 
thief, if he he hut honesty I can hear with other things. 
And indeed it is very rare in London to meet with an 
honest servant." * Southey writes to his daughter 
Edith, in 1824, "All the maids eloped because I had 
turned a man out of the kitchen at eleven o'clock on the 
preceding night." Nay, Hugh Ehodes, in his Bohe of 
Nurture (1577), speaks of servants " ofte fleeting," i. e. 
leaving one master for another. 

One of the most curious things revealed to us in these 
volumes is the fact that John Winthrop, Jr., was seeking 
the philosopher's stone, that universal elixir which could 
transmute all things to its own substance. This is plain 
from the correspondence of Edward Howes. Howes 
goes to a certain doctor, professedly to consult him about 
the method of making a cement for earthen vessels, no 
doubt crucibles. His account of him is amusing, and re- 
minds one of Ben Jonson's Subtle. This was one of the 
many quacks who gulled men during that twilight 
through which alchemy was passing into chemistry. 
" This Dr, for a Dr he is, brags that if he have but the 
hint or notice of any useful thing not yet invented, he 
will undertake to find it out, except some few which he 
hath vowed not to meddle with as vitrum maliahile, per- 
X>et., mot us y via proxima ad Indos d' kqns philosi : all, or 

* Collection of Voyages, &c., from the Library of the Earl of Ox- 
ford, Vol. I. p. 151. 
12 



266 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

anything else he will undertake, but for his private gain, 
to make a monopoly thereof & to sell the use or knowl- 
edge thereof at too high rates." This breed of pedlers 
in science is not yet extinct. The exceptions made by 
the Doctor show a becoming modesty. Again : " I have 
been 2 or 3 times with the Dr & can get but small satis- 
faction about your queries Yet I must confess 

he seemed very free to me, only in the main he was 
mystical. This he said, that when the will of God is you 
shall know what you desire, it will come with such a 
light that it will make a harmony among all your au- 
thors, causing them sweetly to agree, & put you forever 
out of doubt & question." In another letter : " I cannot 
discover into terram incognitam, but I have had a ken of 
it showed unto me. The way to it is, for the most part, 
horrible & fearful, the dangers none worse, to them that are 

destinati filii : sometimes I am travelling that way 

I think I have spoken with some that have been there." 
Howes writes very cautiously : '' Dear friend, I desire 
with all my heart that I might write plainer to you, but 
in discovering the mystery, I may diminish its majesty 
& give occasion to the profane to abuse it, if it should 
fall into unworthy hands." By and by he begins to 
think his first doctor a humbug, but he finds a better. 
Howes was evidently a man of imaginative temper, fit to 
be captivated by the alchemistic theory of the unity of 
composition in nature, which was so attractive to Goethe. 
Perhaps the great poet was himself led to it by his Rosi- 
.crucian studies when writing the first part of Faust. 
Howes tells his friend that " there is all good to be found 
in unity, & all evil in duality k, multiplicity. Phoe- 
nix ilia achniranda sola semper existit, therefore while a 
man & she is two, he shall never see her," — a truth 
of very wide application, and too often lost sight of or 
never seen at all. " The Arabian Philos. I wTit to you 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 267 

of, he was styled among us Dr Lyon, the best of all the 
Piosicrucians * that ever I met withal, far beyond Dr 
Ewer : they that are of his strain are knowing men ; they 
pretend [i. e. claim] to live in free light, they honor God 
& do good to the people among whom they live, & I con- 
ceive you are in the right that they had their learning 
from Arabia." 

Howes is a very interesting person, a mystic of the 
purest kind, and that while learning to be an attorney 
with Emanuel Downing. How little that perfunctory 
person dreamed of what was going on under his nose, 
— as little as of the spiritual wonders that lay beyond 
the tip of it ! Howes was a Swedenborgian before 
Swedenborg. Take this, for example : " But to our 
sympathetica! business whereby we may communicate 
our minds one to another though the diameter of the 
earth interpose. Diana noji est centrum omnium. I 
would have you so good a geometrician as to know your 
own centre. Did you ever yet measure your everlasting 
self, the length of your life, the breadth of your love, 
the depth of your wisdom & the height of your light 1 
Let Truth be your centre, & you may do it, other ways 
not. I could wish you would now begin to leave oif be- 
ing altogether an outward man ; this is but casa Regentis ; 
the Ruler can draw you straight lines from your centre 
to the confines of an infinite circumference, by which 
you may pass from any part of the circumference to 
another without obstacle of earth or secation of lines, if 
you observe & keep but one & the true & only centre, to 
2)ass by it, from it, & to it. Methinks I now see you 
intus et extra & talk to you, but you mind me not be- 
catise you are from home, you are not within, you look 
as if you were careless of yourself ; your hand & your 
voice differ ; 't is my friend's hand, I know it well j but 

* Howes writes the word symbolically. 



268 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

the voice is your enemy's. 0, my friend, if you love 
me, get you home, get you in ! You have a friend as 
well as an enemy. Know them by their voices. The 
one is still driving or enticing you out ; the other would 
have you stay within. Be within and keep within, &; 
all that are within & keep within shall you see know & 
communicate with to the full, & shall not need to strain 
your outward senses to see & hear that which is like 
themselves uncertain & too-too often false, but, abiding 
forever within, in the centre of Truth, from thence you 
may behold & understand the innumerable divers ema- 
nations within the circumference,- & still within ; for 
without are falsities, lies, untruths, dogs &c." Howes 
was tolerant also, not from want of faith, but from depth 
of it. " The relation of your fight with the Indians I 
have read in print, but of the fight among yourselves, 
helium linguarum the strife of tongues, I have heard 
much, but little to the purpose. I wonder your people, 
that pretend to know so much, doe not know that love 
is the fulfilling of the law, & that against love there is 
no law." Howes forgot that what might cause only a 
ripple in London might overwhelm the tiny Colony in 
Boston. Two years later, he writes more philosophicall}^, 
and perhaps with a gentle irony, concerning " two mon- 
strous births & a general earthquake." He hints that 
the people of the Bay might perhaps as well take these 
signs to themselves as lay them at the door of Mrs. 
Hutchinson and what not. " Where is there such 
another people then [as] in New England, that labors 
might & main to have Christ formed in them, yet would 
give or appoint him his shape & clothe him too % It 
cannot be denied that we have conceived many mon- 
strous imaginations of Christ Jesus : the one imagination 
says, Zo, here lie is ; the other says, Lo, there he is ; mul- 
tiplicity of conceptions, but is there any one true shape 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 269 

of Him ? And if one of many produce a shape, 't is 
not the shape of the Son of God, but an ugly horrid 
metamorphosis. Neither is it a hving shape, but a dead 
one, yet a crow thinks her own bird the fairest, & most 
prefer their own wisdom before God's, Antichrist before 
Christ." Howes had certainly arrived at that " centre " 
of which he speaks and was before his time, as a man 
of speculation, never a man of action, may sometimes be. 
He was fitter for Plotinus's colony than Winthrop's. He 
never came to New England, yet there was always a 
leaven of his style of thinkers here. 

Howes was the true adept, seeking what spiritual ore 
there might be among the dross of the hermetic philos- 
ophj. What he says sincerely and inwardly was the 
cant of those outward professors of the doctrine who 
were content to dwell in the material part of it forever. 
In Jonathan Brewster, we have a specimen of these 
Wagners. Is it not curious, that there should have been 
a balneum Marice at New London two hundred j^ears 
ago'? that la reclierclie de VAhsolu should have been go- 
ing on there in a log-hut, under constant fear that the 
Indians would put out, not merely the flame of one lit- 
tle life, but, f\r worse, the fire of our furnace, and so 
rob the world of this divine secret, just on the point of 
revealing itself % Alas ! poor Brewster's secret was one 
that many have striven after before and since, who did 
not call themselves alchemists, — the secret of getting 
gold without earning it, — a chase that brings some men 
to a four-in-hand on Shoddy Avenue, and some to the 
penitentiary, in both cases advertising its utter vanity. 
Brewster is a capital specimen of his class, who are bet- 
ter than the average, because they do mix a little ima- 
gination with their sordidness, and who have also their 
representatives among us, in those who expect the Jen- 
nings and other ideal estates in England. If Hawthorne 



270 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

had but known of him ! And yet how perfectly did his 
genius divine that ideal element in our early New Eng- 
land life, conceiving what must have been without ask- 
ing proof of what actually was ! 

An extract or two will sufficiently exhibit Brewster in 
his lunes. Sending back some alchemistic book to 
Winthrop, he tells him that if his name be kept secret, 
" I will write as clear a light, as far as I dare to, in find- 
ing the first ingredience The first figure in Flamo- 

nell doth plainly resemble the first ingredience, what it 
is, & from whence it comes, & how gotten, as there you 
may plainly see set forth by 2 resemblances held in a 
man's hand ; for the confections there named is a delu- 
sion, for they are but the operations of the work after 
some time set, as the scum of the Red Sea,. which is the 
Virgin's Milk upon the top of the vessel, wdiite. Red Sea 
is the sun & moon calcinated & brought & reduced into 
water mineral which in some time, & most of the whole 
time, is red. 2ndly, the fat of mercurial wind, that is the 
fat or quintessence of sun & moon, earth & water, drawn 
out from them both, & flies aloft & bore up by the oper- 
ation of our mercury, that is our fire which is our air or 
wind." This is as satisfactory as Lepidus's account of 
the generation of the crocodile : " Your serpent of Egypt 
is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun : 
so is your crocodile." After describing the three kinds 
of fire, that of the lamp, that of ashes, and that against 
nature, which last " is the fire of fire, that is the secret 
fire drawn wp, being the quintessence of the sun & 
moon, with the other mercurial water joined with & to- 
gether, which is fire elemental," he tells us that " these 
fires are & doth contain the whole mystery of the work." 
The reader, perhaps, thinks that he has nothing to do 
but forthwith to turn all the lead he can lay his hands 
on into gold. But no : " If you had the first ingi^e- 



|l 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 271 

dience & the proportion of each, yet all were nothing if 
you had not the certain times & seasons of the planets 
&, signs, when to give more or less of this fire, namely 
a hot & dry, a cold & moist fire which you must use in 
the mercurial water before it comes to black & after 
into white &, then red, which is only done by these fires, 
which when you practise you will easily see & perceive, 
that you shall stand amazed, & admire at the great & 
admirable wisdom* of God, that can produce such a won- . 
derful, efficacious, powerful thing as this is to convert 
all metallic bodies to its own nature, which may be 
well called a first essence. I say by such weak simple 
means of so little value & so little & easy labor & skill, 
that I may say with Artephus, 200 page, it is of a 
worke so easy & short, fitter for women & young chil- 
dren than sage & grave men I thank the Lord, I 

understand the matter perfectly in the said book, yet I 
could desire to have it again 12 months hence, for about 
that time I shall have occasion to peruse, whenas I come 
to the second working which is most difl&cult, which 
will be some three or [4] months before the perfect 
white, & afterwards, as Artephus saith, I may burn my 
books, for he saith it is one regiment as well for the red 
as for the white. The Lord in mercy give me life to 
see the end of it ! " — an exclamation I more than once 
made in the course of some of Brewster's periods. 

Again, under pledge of profound secrecy, he sends 
Winthrop a manuscript, which he may communicate to 
the owner of the volume formerly lent, because " it 
gave me such light in the second work as I should not 
readily have found out by study, also & especially how 
to work the elixir fit for medicine & healing all maladies 
which is clean another way of working than we held 
formerly. Also a light given how to dissolve any hard 
substance into the elixir, which is also another work. 



272 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 



i 



And many other things which in Eibley [Ripley '?] I 
could not find out. More works of the same I would 
gladly see .... for, Sir, so it is that any book of this 
subject, I can understand it, though never so darkly ■ 
written, having both knowledge & experience of the 
world,* that now easily I may understand their envi- 
ous carriages to hide it You may marvel why I 

should give any light to others in this thing before I 
have perfected my own. This knotv, that my work 
iDeing true thus far by all their writings, it cannot fail 
.... for if &c (fee you cannot miss if you would, ex- 
cept you break your glass." He confesses he is mista- 
ken as to the time required, which he now, as well as I 
can make out, reckons at about ten years. " I fear I 
shall not live to see it finished, in regard partly of the 
Indians, wlio, I fear, will raise wars, as also I have a 
conceit that God sees me not worthy of such a blessing, 
by reason of my manifold miscarriages." Therefore he 
" will shortly write all the whole work in few words 
plainly which may be done in 20 lines from the first to 
the last ife seal it up in a little box & subscribe it to 
yourself . . . . tfe will so write it that neither wife nor 
children shall know thereof." If Winthrop should suc- 
ceed in bringing the work to perfection, Brewster begs 
him to remember his wife and children. " I mean if 
this my work should miscarry by wars of the Indians, 
for I may not remove it till it be perfected, otherwise I 
should so unsettle the body by removing sun & moon 
out of their settled places, that there would then be no 
other after working." Once more he inculcates secrecy, 
and for a most comical reason : " For it is such a secret 
as is not fit for every one either for secrecy or for parts 
to use it, as God's secret for his glory, to do good there- 
with, or else they may do a great deal of hurt, spend- 

* " World " here should clearly be " work." 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 273 

ing <fe emj)loying it to satisfy sinful lusts. There- 
fore, I iiitreat you, sir, spare to use my name, & let my 
letters I send either be safely kept or burned that I 
write about it, for indeed, sir, I am more than before 
sensible of the evil effects that will arise by the publish- 
ing of it. I should never be at quiet, neither at home 
nor abroad, for one or other that would be enquiring & 
seeking after knowledge thereof, that I should be tired 
out & forced to leave the place : nay, it would be blazed 
abroad into Europe." How much more comic is nature 
than any comedy ! Mutato nomine de te. Take heart, 
ambitious youth, the sun and moon will be no more dis- 
concerted by any effort of yours than by the pots and 
pans of Jonathan Brewster. It is a curious proof of the 
duality so common (yet so often overlooked) in human 
character, that Brewster was all this while manager of 
the Plymouth trading-post, near what is now New Lon- 
don. The only professors of the transmutation of met- 
als who still impose on mankind are to be found in what 
is styled the critical department of literature. Their 
materia prima, or universal solvent, serves equally for 
the lead of Tupper or the brass of Swinburne. 

In a letter of Sir Kenelm Digby to J. Winthrop, Jr., 
we find some odd prescriptions. " For all sorts of 
agues, I have of late tried the following magnetical ex- 
periment with infaUible success. Pare the patient's 
nails when the fit is coming on, & put the parings into 
a little bag of fine linen or sarsenet, & tie that about a 
live eel's neck in a tub of water. The eel will die & the 
patient will recover. And if a dog or hog eat that eel, 
they will also die." 

" The man recovered of the bite, 
The dog it was that died ! " 

" I have known one that cured all deliriums <fe frenzies 
Vvhatsoever, & at once taking, with an elixir made of dew, 

12* R 



274 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

nothing but dew piu'ified & nipped np in a glass & di- 
gested 15 months till all of it was become a gray powder, 
not one drop of humidity remaining. This I know to 
be true, & that first it was as black as ink, then green, 
then gray, & at 22 months' end it was as white & 
lustrous as any oriental pearl. But it cured manias at 
15 months' end." Poor Brewster would have been the 
better for a dose of it, as well as some m our day, who 
expect to cure men of being men by act of Congress. 
In the same letter Digby boasts of having made known 
the properties of quinquina, and also of the sympathetic 
powder, with which latter he wrought a " famous cure " 
of pleasant James Howell, author of the " Letters." 
I do not recollect that Howell anywhere alludes to it. 
In the same letter, Digby speaks of the books he had 
sent to Harvard College, and promises to send more. 
In all Paris he cannot find a copy of Blaise Viginere 
Des Chiffres. " I had it in my library in England, but 
at the plundering of my house I lost it with many other 
good books. I have laid out in all places for it." The 
words we have underscored would be called a Yankeeism 
now. The house was Gatehurst, a fine Elizabethan 
dwelling, still, or lately, standing. Digby made his 
peace with Cromwell, and professes his readiness to 
spend his blood for him. He kept well with both sides, 
and we are not surprised to find Hooke saying that he 
hears no good of him from any. 

The early colonists found it needful to bring over a 
few trained soldiers, both as drillmasters and engineers. 
Underbill, Patrick, and Gardner had served in the Low 
Countries, probably also Mason. As Paris has been 
said to be not precisely the place for a deacon, so the 
camp of the Prince of Orange could hardly have been 
the best training-school for Puritans in practice, however 
it may have been for masters of casuistic theology. The 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 275 

position of these rough warriors among a people like 
those of the first emigration must have been a droll one. 
That of Captain Underhill certainly was. In all our 
early history, there is no figure so comic. Full of the 
pedantry of his profession and fond of noble phrases, he 
is a kind of cross between Dugald Dalgetty and Ancient 
Pistol, with a slight relish of the miles gloriosus. Under- 
hill had taken side with Mr. Wheelwright in his heretical 
opinions, and there is every reason why he should have 
maintained, with all the ardor of personal interest, the 
efficiency of a covenant of grace without reference to 
the works of the subject of it. Coming back from a 
visit to England in 1638, he " was questioned for some 
speeches uttered by him in the ship, viz : that they at 
Boston were zealous as the scribes and pharisees were 
and as Paul was before his conversion, w^hich he deny- 
ing, they were proved to his face by a sober woman 
whom he had seduced in the ship and drawn to his opin=» 
ion ; but she was afterwards better informed in the 
truth. Among other passages, he told her how he came 
by his assurance, saying that, having long lain under a 
spirit of bondage, and continued in a legal way near five 
years, he could get no assurance, till at length, as he 
was taking a pipe of the good creature tobacco, the 
spirit fell home upon his heart, an absolute promise of 
free grace, wdth such assurance and joy, as he never 
doubted since of his good estate, neither should he, 
w^hatsoever sin he should fall into, — a good preparative 
for such motions as he familiarly used to make to some 

of that sex The next day he was called again 

and banished. The Lord's day after, he made a speech 
in the assembly, showing that as the Lord was pleased to 
convert Paul as he was persecuting &c, so he might mani- 
fest himself to him as he was making moderate use of 
the good creature called tobacco." A week later "he was 



276 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

privately dealt with upon suspicion of incontinency . . . . 
but his excuse was that the woman was in great trouble of 
mind, and some temptations, and that he resorted to 
her to comfort her." He went to the Eastward, and, 
having run himself out there, thought it best to come 
back to Boston and reinstate himself by eating his leek. 
" He came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to 
take great pride in his bravery and neatness) without a 
band, in a foul linen cap pulled close to his eyes, and, 
standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs and 
abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course, his 
adultery, his hypocrisy &c. He spake well, save that 
his blubbering &c. interrupted him." We hope he 
was a sincere penitent, but men of his complexion 
are apt to be pleased with such a tragi-comedy of self- 
abasement, if only they can be chief actors and con- 
spicuous enough therein. In the correspondence before 
us Underbill appears in full turkey-cock proportions. 
Not having been advanced according to his own opinion 
of his merits, he writes to Governor Winthrop, with an 
oblique threat that must have amused him somewhat : 
" I profess, sir, till I know the cause, I shall not be 
satisfied, but I hope God will subdue me to his will ; yet 
this I say that such handling of officers in foreign parts 
hath so far subverted some of them as to cause them 
turn public rebels against their state & kingdom, which 
God forbid should ever be found once so much as to 
appear in my breast." Why, then the world 's mine 
oyster, which I with sword will open ! Next we hear 
him on a point of military discipline at Salem. " It 
is this : how they have of their own appointment made 
them a captain, lieutenant & ensign, & after such a 
manner as was never heard of in any school of war, nor 

in no kingdom under heaven For my part, if 

there should not be a reformation in this disordered 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 277 

practise, I would not acknowledge such officers. If 
officers should be of no better esteem than for consta- 
bles to place them, & martial discipline to proceed dis- 
orderly, I would rather lay down my command than to 
shame so noble a prince from whom we came." Again : 
*' Whereas it is somewhat questionable whether the 
three months I was absent, as well in the service of the 
country as of other particular persons, my request there- 
fore is that this honored Court would be pleased to de- 
cide this controversy, myself alleging it to be the cus- 
tom of Nations that, if a Commander be lent to another 
State, by that State to whom he is a servant, both his 
place & means is not detained from him, so long as he 
doth not refuse the call of his own State to which he is 
a servant, in case they shall call him home." Then 
bringing up again his " ancient suit " for a grant of 
land, he throws in a neat touch of piety: "& if the 
honored Court shall vouchsafe to make some addition, 
that which hath not been deserved, by the same power 
of God, may be in due season." In a postscript, he gives 
a fine philosophical reason for this desired addition which 
will go to the hearts of many in these days of high 
prices and wasteful taxation. " The time was when a 
little went far ; then much was not known nor desired ; 
the reason of the difference lieth only in the error of 
judgment, for nature requires no more to uphold it now 
than when it was satisfied with less." The valiant Cap- 
tain interprets the law of nations, as sovereign powers 
are wont to do, to suit his advantage in the special case. 
We find a parallel case in a letter of Bryan Rosseter to 
John Winthrop, Jr., pleading for a remission of taxes. 
" The lawes of nations exempt allowed phisitians from 
personall services, & their estates from rates <fe assess- 
ments." In the Declaration of the town of Southamp- 
ton on Long Island (1673), the dignity of constable is 



278 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

valued at a juster rate than Underhill was inclined to 
put upon it. The Dutch, it seems, demanded of them " to 
deliver up to them the badge of Civil & Military power ; 
namely, the Constable's staflPe & the Colonel's." Mayor 
Munroe of New Orleans did not more effectually magnify 
his office when he surrendered the city to General Butler. 
Underhill's style is always of the finest. His spell- 
ing was under the purest covenant of grace. I must 
give a single specimen of it from a letter whose high 
moral tone is all the more diverting that it was written 
while he was under excommunication for the sin which 
he afterwards confessed. It is addressed to Winthrop 
and Dudley. " Honnored in the Lord. Youer silenc 
one more admirse me. I youse chrischan playnnes. I 
know you love it. Silenc can not reduce the hart of 
youer love^ brother : I would the rightchous would smite 
me, espeschali youer slfe & the honnored Depoti to whom 
I also dereckt this letter together with youer honnored 
slfe. Jesos Christ did wayt ; & God his Father did dig 
and telfe bout the barren figtre before he would cast 
it of : I would to God you would tender my soule 
so as to youse playnnes with me." (As if anything 
could be plainer than excommunication and banish- 
ment !) " I wrot to you both, but now [no] answer ; & 
here I am dayli abused by malischous tongse : John 
Baker I here hath rot to the honnored depoti how as I 
was dronck & like to be cild, & both falc, upon okachon 
I delt with Wannerton for intrushon, & findding them 
resolutli bent to rout out all gud a mong us & advanc 
there superstischous waye, & by boystrous words inde- 
ferd to fritten men to acomplish his end, & he abusing 
me to my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his in- 
solent and dasterdli sperrite, but now [no] danger of 
my life, although it might hafe bin just with God to 
hafe giffen me in the hanse of youer enemise & mine, 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 279 

for they hat the wayse of the Lord & them that profes 
them, (fe therfore layes trapes to cachte the pore into 
there deboyst corses, as ister daye on Pickeren their 
Chorch Warden cairn up to us with intent to mak some 
of ourse drone, as is sospeckted, but the Lord soferd him 
so to misdemen himslfe as he is hkh to h by the hielse 

this too month My hombel request is that you 

will be charitabel of me Let justies and merci be 

goyned You may plese to soggest youer will to 

this barrer, you will find him tracktabel." The conclud- 
ing phrase seems admirably chosen, when we consider the 
means of making people " tractable " which the magis- 
trates of the Bay had in their hands, and were not slow 
to exercise, as Underhill himself had experienced. 

I cannot deny myself the pleasure of giving one 
more specimen of the Captain's " grand-delinquent " 
style, as I once heard such fine writing called by a per- 
son who little dreamed what a hit he had made. So far 
as I have observed, our public defaulters, and others who 
have nothing to say for themselves, always rise in style 
as they sink in self-respect. He is speaking of one 
Scott, who had laid claim to certain lands, and had been 
called on to show his title. " If he break the comand 
of the Asembli & bring not in the counterfit portreture 
of the King imprest in yello waxe, anext to his false per- 
petuiti of 20 mile square, where by he did chet the 
Town of Brouckhaven, he is to induer the sentance of 
the Court of Asisies." Pistol would have been charmed 
with that splendid amplification of the Great Seal. We 
have seen nothing like it in our day, excejDt in a speech 
made to Mr. George Peabody at Danvers, if I recollect, 
while that gentleman was so elaborately concealing from 
his left hand what his right had been doing. As ex- 
amples of Captain Underhill's adroitness in phonetic 
spelling, I offer fafarahel and poseschonse, and reluc- 
tantly leave him. 



280 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

Another very entertaining fellow for those "who are 
willing to work through a pretty thick husk of tiresome- 
ness for a genuine kernel of humor underneath is Cod- 
dington. The elder Winthrop endured many trials, but 
I doubt if any were sharper than those which his son 
had to undergo in the correspondence of this excellently 
tiresome man. Tantce molis Romanam coiidere gentem ! 
The dulness of Coddington, always that of no ordinary 
man, became irritable and aggressive after being stung 
b}^ the gadfly of Quakerism. Running counter to its 
proper nature, it made him morbidly uneasy. Already 
an Anabaptist, his brain does not seem to have been large 
enough to lodge two maggots at once with any comfort 
to himself. Fancy John Winthrop, Jr., with all the af- 
fairs of the Connecticut Colony on his back, expected to 
prescribe alike for the spiritual and bodily ailments of 
all the hypochondriacs in his government, and with 
Philip's war impending, — fancy him exposed also to 
perpetual trials like this : " G. F. [George Fox] hath sent 
thee a book of his by Jere : Bull, & two more now 
which thou mayest communicate to thy Council & offi- 
cers. Also I remember before thy last being in Eng- 
land, I sent thee a book written by Francis Howgall 
against persecution, iDy Joseph Nicallson which book 
thou lovingly accepted and communicated to the Com- 
missioners of the United Colonies (as I desired) also 
J. N. thou entertained with a loving respect which en- 
couraged me " (fatal hospitality !) — "As a token of that 
ancient love that for this 42 years I have had for thee, 
I have sent thee three Manuscripts, one of 5 queries, 
other is of 15, about the love of Jesus &c. The 3d is 
why we cannot come to the worship which was not set 
up by Christ Jesus, which I desire thee to communicate 
to the priests to answer in thy jurisdiction, the Massa- 
cliusetts, New Plymouth, or elsewhere, & send their 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 281 

answer in writing to me. Also two printed papers to set 
up in thy house. It 's reported in Barbadoes that thy 
brother Sammuell shall be sent Governour to Antego." 
What a mere dust of sugar in the last sentence for such 
a portentous pill ! In his next letter he has other wTit- 
mgs of G. F., " not yet copied, which if thou desireth, 
when I hear from thee, I may convey them unto thee. 
Also sence G. Ffox departure William Edmondson is ar- 
rived at this Island, who having given out a paper to all 
in authority, which, my wife having copied, I have here 
inclosed presented thee therewith." Books and manu- 
scripts were not all. Coddington was also glad to bestow 
on Winthrop any w^andering tediousness in the flesh that 
came to hand. " I now understand of John Stubbs free- 
dom to visit thee (with the said Jo : B.) he is a larned 
man, as witness the battle door * on 35 languages," — a 
terrible man this, capable of inflicting himself on three 
dozen different kindreds of men. It will be observed 
that Coddington, with his "thou desireths," is not quite 
so well up in the grammar of his thee-and-thouing as 
my Lord Coke. Indeed, it is rather pleasant to see that 
in his alarm about " the enemy," in 1673, he backslides 
into the second person plural. If Winthrop ever looked 
over his father's correspondence, he would have read in 
a letter of Henry Jacie the following dreadful example 
of retribution : " The last news we heard was that the 
Bores in Bavaria slew about 300 of the Swedish forces <fe 
took about 200 prisoners, of which they put out the 
eyes of some & cut out the tonges of others & so sent 
them to the King of Sweden, which caused him to la- 
ment bytterly for an hour. Then he sent an army & 
destroyed those Bores, about 200 or 300 of their towns. 
Thus we hear." Think of that, Master Coddington ! 

* The title-page of which our learned ^larsh has cited for the ety- 
mology of the word. 



282 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

Could the sinful heart of man always suppress the wish 
that a Gustavus might arise to do judgment on the Bores 
of Rhode Island ? The unkindest part of it was that, 
on Coddington's own statement, Winthrop had never 
persecuted the Quakers, and had even endeavored to save 
Robinson and Stevenson in 1659. 

Speaking of the execution of these two martyrs to 
the bee in their bonnets, John Davenport gives us a 
capital example of the way in which Divine "judgments " 
may be made to work both ways at the pleasm-e of the 
interpreter. As the crowd was going home from the hang- 
ing, a drawbridge gave way, and some lives w^ere lost. The 
Quakers, of course, made the most of this lesson to the 
pontijices in the bearing power of timber, claiming it as 
a proof of God's w^rath against the persecutors. This 
w^as rather hard, since none of the magistrates perished, 
and the popular feeling was strongly in favor of the vic-M: 
tims of their severity. But Davenport gallantly cap- 
tures these Quaker guns, and turns them against the 
enemy himself. " Sir, the hurt that befell so many, by 
their own rashness, at the Draw Bridge in Boston, being 
on the day that the Quakers w^ere executed, was not 
without God's special providence in judgment & wrath, I 
fear, against the Quakers & their abettors, who will be 
much hardened thereby." This is admirable, especially 
as his parenthesis about " their own rashness " assumes 
that the whole thing Was owdng to natural causes. The 
pity for the Quakers, too, implied in the " I fear," is a 
nice touch. It is always noticeable how much more lib- 
eral those who deal in God's command without his power 
are of his wrath than of his mercy. But we should 
never understand the Puritans if we did not bear in 
Inind that they were still prisoners in that religion of 
Fear which casts out Love. The nearness of God was 
oftener a terror than a comfort to them. Yet perhaps 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTUEIES AGO. 283 

in them was the last apparition of Faith as a wonder- 
worker in human affairs. Take away from them what 
you will, you cannot deny them that, and its constant 
presence made them great in a way and measure of 
which this generation, it is to be feared, can have but a 
very inadequate conception. If men now-a-days find 
their tone antipathetic, it would be modest at least to 
consider whether the fault be wholly theirs, — whether 
it was they who lacked, or we who have lost. Whether 
they were right or wrong in their dealing with the Qua- 
kers is not a question to be decided glibly after two cen- 
turies' struggle toward a conception of toleration very 
imperfect even yet, perhaps impossible to human nature. 
If they did not choose what seems to us the wisest way 
of keeping the Devil out of their household, they cer- 
tainly had a very honest will to keep him out, which we 
might emulate with advantage. However it be in other 
cases, historic toleration must include intolerance among 
things to be tolerated. 

The false notion which the first settlers had of the 
savages by whom the continent was beflead rather than 
inhabited, arose in part from what they had heard of 
Mexico and Peru, in part from the splendid exaggera- 
tions of the early travellers, who could give their readers 
an El Dorado at the cheap cost of a good lie. Hence 
the kings, dukes, and earls who were so plenty among 
the red men. Pride of descent takes many odd shapes, 
none odder than when it hugs itself in an ancestry of 
filthy barbarians, who daubed themselves for ornament 
with a mixture of bear's-grease and soot, or colored clay, 
and were called emperors by Captain John Smith and 
his compeers. The droll contrast between this imagi- 
nary royalty and, the squalid reality is nowhere exposed 
with more ludicrous imconsciousness than in the follow- 
ing passage of a letter from Fitz-John Winthrop to his 



284 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

father, November, 1674 : " The bearer hereof, Mr. Dan- 
yell, one of the Rojal Indian blood .... does desire 
me to give an accoant to yourself of the late unhappy 
accident which has happened to him. A little time 
since, a careless girl playing with fire at the door, it im- 
mediately took hold of the mats, & in an instant con- 
sumed it to ashes, with all the common as well as his 
lady's chamber furniture, & his own wardrobe & armory, 
Indian plate, & money to the value (as is credibly re- 
ported in his estimation) of more than an hundred 
pounds Indian The Indians have handsomely al- 
ready built him a good house & brought him in several 
necessaries for his present supply, but that which takes 
deepest melancholy impression upon him is the loss of 
an excellent Masathuset cloth cloak & hat, which was 
only seen upon holy days & their general sessions. His 
journey at this time is only to intreat your favor & the 
gentlemen there for a kind relief in his necessity, having 
no kind of garment but a short jerkin which w^as chari- 
tably given him by one of his Common-Councilmen. He 
principally aims at a cloak & hat." 

" King Stephen was a worthy peer, 
His breeches cost him half a crown." 

But it will be observed that there is no allusion to any 
such article of dress in the costume of this prince of 
Pequot. Some light is perhaps thrown on this deficien- 
cy by a line or two in one of Williams's letters, where 
he says : " I have long had scruples of selling the Na- 
tives ought but what may tend or bring to civilizing : I 
therefore neither brought nor shall sell them loose coats 
nor breeches." Precisely the opposite course was 
deemed effectual with the Highland Scotch, between 
whom and our Indians there was a very close analogy. 
They were compelled by law to adopt the usages of 
Gallia Braccata, and sansculottism made a- penal offence. 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 285 

What impediment to civilization "Williams had discov- 
ered in the offending garment it is hard to say. It is a 
question for Herr Teufelsdrock. Roj'^alty, at any rate, in 
our day, is dependent for much of its success on the tailor. 
Williams's opportunities of studying the Indian charac- 
ter were perhaps greater than those of any other man 
of his time. He was always an advocate for justice 
toward them. But he seems to have had no better 
opinion of them than Mr. Parkman,* calling them short- 
ly and sharply, " wolves endowed with men's brains." 
The same change of feeling has followed the same causes 
in their case as in that of the Highlanders, — they have 
become romantic in proportion as they ceased to be dan- 
gerous. 

As exhibitions of the writer's character, no letters in 
the collection have interested us more than those of 
John Tinker, who for many years was a kind of steward 
for John Winthrop and his son. They show him to 
have been a thoroughly faithful, grateful, and unselfish 
servant. He does not seem to have prospered except 
in winning respect, for when he died his funeral charges 
were paid by the public. We learn from one of his let- 
ters that John Winthrop, Jr., had a negro (presumably 
a slave) at Paquanet, for he says that a mad cow there 
" had almost spoiled the neger & made him ferfull to 
tend the rest of the cattell." That such slaves must 
have been rare, however, is plain from his constant com- 
plaints about the difficulty of procuring " help," some 
of which we have already quoted. His spelling of the 
word " ferfull " shows that the New England pronuncia- 
tion of that word had been brought from the old coun- 
try. He also uses the word " creatures " for kine, and 
the like, precisely as our farmers do now. There is one 
very comical passage in a letter of the 2d of August, 
* In his Jesuits in North America. 



286 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

1660, where lie sajs : " There hath been a motion by 
some, the chief of the town, (New London) for my keep- 
ing an ordinary, or rather under the notion of a tavern, 
which, though it suits not with my genius, yet am almost 
persuaded to accept for some good grounds." Tinker's 
modesty is most creditable to him, and we wish it were 
more common now. No people on the face of the earth 
suffer so much as we from impostors who keep incon- 
veniences, " under the notion of a tavern," without any 
call of natural genius thereto ; none endure with such 
unexemplary patience the superb indifference of inn- 
keepers, and the condescending inattention of their gen- 
tlemanly deputies. We are the thralls of our railroads 
and hotels, and we deserve it. 

Richard Saltonstall writes to John Winthrop, Jr., in 
1636 : " The best thing that I have to beg your thoughts 
for at this present is a motto or two that Mr. Prynne 
hath writ upon his chamber walls in the Tower." We 
copy a few phrases, chiefly for the contrast they make ■ 
•with Lovelace's famous verses to Althea. Nothing 
could mark more sharply the different habits of mind 
in Puritan and Cavalier. Lovelace is very charming, 
but he sings 



" The sweetness, mercy, majesty, 
And glories of his King," 



I 



to wit, Charles I. To him " stone walls do not a prison 
make," so long as he has " freedom in his love, and in 
his soul is free." Prynne's King was of another and 
higher kind : " Career excludit mimdum, includit Deum. 
Deus est turris etiam in turre : turris lihertatis in turre 

angusti(je : Turris quietis in turre molestice Arc- 

tari non potest qui in ipsa Dei infinitate incarceratus sp>a- 

tiatur mi crus sentit in nervo si animus sit in 

coelo : nil corpus patitur m ergastulo, si anima sit in 
ChristoP If Lovelace has the advantage in fancy, 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 287 

Prynne has it as clearly in depth of sentiment. There 
could be little" doubt which of the parties represented 
by these men would have the better if it came to a death- 
grapple. 

There is curiously little sentiment in these volumes. 
Most of the letters, except where some point of doctrine 
is concerned, are those of shrewd, practical men, busy 
about the affairs of this world, and earnest to build 
their New Jerusalem on something more solid than 
cloud. . The truth is, that men anxious about their souls 
have not been by any means the least skilful in provid- 
ing for the wants of the body. It was far less the en- 
thusiasm than the common sense of the Puritans which 
made them what they were in politics and religion. 
That a great change should be wrought in the settlers by 
the circumstances of their position was inevitable ; that 
this change should have had some disillusion in it, that 
it should have weaned them from the ideal and wonted 
them to the actual, was equally so. In 1664, not much 
more than a generation after the settlement, Williams 
prophesies : " When we that have been the eldest are 
rotting (to-morrow or next day) a generation will act, I 
fear, far unlike the first Winthrops and their models of 
love. I fear that the common trinity of the world 
(profit, preferment, pleasure) will here be the tria omnia 
as in all the world beside, that Prelacy and Papacy too 
will in this wilderness predominate, that god Land will 
be (as now it is) as great a god with us English as god 
Gold was with the Spaniards. While we are here, no- 
ble sir, let us viriliter hoc agere, rem agere humanam, di- 
vinam, Christianam, which, I believe, is all of a most 
public genius," or, as we should now say, true patriotism. 
If Williams means no play on the word humanam and 
divinam, the order of precedence in which he marshals 
them is noticeable. A generation later, what Williams 



288 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 

had predicted was in a gi'eat measure verified. But 
what made New England Puritanism narrow was what 
made Scotch Cameronianism narrow, — its being se- 
cluded from the great movement of the nation. Till I 
1660 the colony was ruled and mostly inhabited by Eng- 
lishmen closely connected with the party dominant in 
the mother country, and with their minds broadened by 
having to deal with questions of state and European 
policy. After that time they sank rapidly into provin- 
cials, narrow in thought, in culture, in creed. Such a pe- 
dantic portent as Cotton Mather would have been impossi- 
ble in the first generation; he was the natural growth of 
the third, — the manifest judgment of God on a genera- 
tion who thought Words a saving substitute for Things. 
Perhaps some injustice has been done to men like the 
second Governor Dudley, and it should be counted to 
them rather as a merit than a fault, that they wished 
to bring New England back within reach of the invigo- 
rating influence of national sympathies, and to rescue it 
from a tradition which had become empty formalism. 
Puritanism was dead, and its profession had become a 
wearisome cant before the Revolution of 1688 gave it 
that vital force in politics which it had lost in religion. 

I have gleaned all I could of what is morally pictu- 
resque or characteristic from these volumes, but New Eng- 
land history has rather a gregarious than a personal inter- 
est. Here, by inherent necessity rather than design, was 
made the first experiment in practical democracy, and 
accordingly hence began that reaction of the New World 
iipon the Old whose result can hardly yet be estimated. 
There is here no temptation to make a hero, who shall 
sum up in his own individuality and carry forward by 
his own will that purpose of which we seem to catch such 
bewitching glances in history, wdiich reveals itself more 
clearly and constantly, perhaps, in the annals of New 



NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 289 

England than elsewhere, and which yet, at best, is but 
tentative, doubtful of itself, turned this way and that by 
chance, made up of instinct, and modified by circum- 
stance quite as much as it is directed by deliberate fore- 
thought. Such a purpose, or natural craving, or result 
of temj)orary influences, may be misguided by a power- 
ful character to his own ends, or, if he be strongly in 
sympathy with it, may be hastened toward its own ful- 
filment ; but there is no such heroic element in our 
drama, and what is remarkable is, that, under whatever 
government, democracy grew with the grow^th of the 
New England Colonies, and was at last potent enough to 
wrench them, and the better part of the continent with 
them, from the mother country. It is true that Jeffer- 
son embodied in the Declaration of Independence the 
speculative theories he had learned in France, but the 
impulse to separation came from New England ; and 
those theories had been long since embodied there in the 
practice of the people, if they had never been formu- 
lated in distinct propositions. 

I have little sympathy with declaimers about the Pil- 
grim Fathers, who look upon them all as men of grand 
conceptions and superhuman foresight. An entire ship's 
company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. 
It is not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, 
as a man in a hurry is apt to cram his travelling-bag, with 
a total disregard of shape or texture. But perhaps it may 
be found that the facts will only fit comfortably together 
on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have a con- 
ception (which those will call grand who regard simpli- 
city as a necessary element of grandeur) of founding 
here a commonwealth on those two eternal bases of Faith 
and Work ; that they had, indeed, no revolutionary ideas 
of universal liberty, but yet, what answered the purpose 
quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man 
13 8 



290 NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO. 



i 



and the fatherhood of God ; and that they did not so 
much propose to make all things new, as to develop the 
latent possibilities of English law and English character, 
by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of the 
one was gradually discommoning the other from the 
broad fields of natural right. They were not in advance 
of their age, as it is called, for no one who is so can ever 
work profitably in it ; but they were alive to the highest 
and most earnest thinking of their time. 




lESSING.* 



When Burns's humor gave its last pathetic flicker in 
his " John, don't let the awkward sqaad fire over me," 
was he thinking of actual brother-volunteers, or of pos- 
sible biographers 1 Did his words betray only the rhyth- 
mic sensitiveness of poetic nerves, or were they a fore- 
boding of that helpless future, when the poet lies at the 
mercy of the plodder, — of that bi-voluminous shape in 
which dulness overtakes and revenges itself on genius at 
last 1 Certainly Burns has suffered as much as most 
large-natured creatures from well-meaning efforts to ac- 
count for him, to explain him away, to bring him into 
harmony with those w^ell-regulated minds which, during 
a good part of the last century, found out a way, through 
rhyme, to snatch a prosiness beyond the reach of prose. 
Nay, he has been wronged also by that other want of 
true appreciation, which deals in panegyric, and would 
put asunder those two things which God has joined, — 
the poet and the man, — as if it were not the same rash 
improvidence that was the happiness of the verse and 
the misfortune of the ganger. But his death-bed was 

* G. E. Lessing. Sein Leben rind seine WerTce. Yon Adolf 
Stahr. Vermehrte und verbesserte Volks-Ausgabe. Dritte Auflage. 
Berlin. 1864. 

The Same. Translated by E. P. Evans, Ph. D., Professor, &c. in 
the University of Michigan. Boston: W.V.Spencer. 1866. 2 vols. 

G. E. Lessing's Sammtliche Schriften, heransgegeben von Karl 
Lachmann. 1853-57. 12 Baade. 



292 LESSING. 

at least not haunted by the unaj)peasable apprehension 
of a German for his biographer ; and that the fame of 
Lessing should have four times survived this cunningest 
assault of oblivion is proof enough that its base is broad 
and deep-set. 

There seems to be, in the average German mind, an 
inability or a disinclination to see a thing as it really is, 
unless it be a^ matter of science. It finds its keenest 
jjleasure in divining a profound significance in the most tri- 
fling things, and the number of mare's-nests that have 
been stared into by the German Gelekrter through his spec- 
tacles passes calculation. They are the one object of con- 
templation that makes that singular being perfectly hap- 
py, and they seem to be as common as those of the stork. 
In the dark forest of sesthetics, particularly, he finds 
them at every turn, — " fanno tutto il loco varo." If 
the greater part of our English criticism is apt only to 
skim the surface, the German, by way of being profound, 
too often burrows in delighted darkness quite beneath its 
subject, till the reader feels the ground hollow beneath 
him, and is fearful of caving into unknown depths of 
stagnant metaphysic air at every step. The Commen- 
tary on Shakespeare of Gervinus, a really superior man, 
reminds one of the Roman Campagna, penetrated under- 
ground in all directions by strange winding caverns, the 
work of human borers in search of we know not what. 
Above are the divine poet's larks and daisies, his incom- 
municable skies, his broad prospects of life and nature ; 
and meanwhile our Teutonic teredo worms his way be- 
low, and offers to be our guide into an obscurity of his 
own contriving. The reaction of language upon style, 
and even upon thought, by its limitations on the one 
hand, and its suggestions on the other, is so apparent to 
any one who has made even a slight study of compara- 
tive literature, that we have sometimes thought the Ger- 



LESSING. 293 

man tongue at least an accessory before the fact, if 
nothing more, in the offences of German Hterature. 
The language has such a fatal genius for going stern- 
foremost, for yawing, and for not minding the helm with- 
out some ten minutes' notice in advance, that he must 
be a great sailor indeed who can safely make it the ve- 
hicle for anything but imperishable commodities. Vis- 
cher's jEsthetiJc, the best treatise on the subject, ancient 
or modern, is such a book as none but a German could 
write, and it is wTitten as none but a German could have 
written it. The abstracts of its sections are sometimes 
nearly as long as the sections themselves, and it is as 
hard to make out which head belongs to which tail, as 
in a knot of snakes thawing themselves into sluggish in- 
dividuality under a spring sun. The average German 
professor spends his life in making lanterns fit to guide 
us through the obscurest passages of all the ologies and 
ysics, and there are none in the world of such honest 
workmanship. They are durable, they have intensifying 
glasses, reflectors of the most scientific make, capital 
sockets in which to set a light, and a handsome lump 
of potentially illuminating tallow is thrown in. But, in 
order to see by them, the explorer must make his owai 
candle, supply his own cohesive wick of common-sense, 
and light it himself And yet the admirable thorough- 
ness of the German intellect ! We should be ungrateful 
indeed if we did not acknowledge that it has supplied the 
raw material in almost every branch of science for the 
defter wdts of other nations to work on ; yet we have a 
suspicion that there are certain lighter departments of 
literature in which it may be misapplied, and turn into 
something very like clumsiness. Delightful as Jean 
Paul's humor is, how much more so ^vould it be if he 
only knew when to stop ! Ethereally deep as is his sen- 
timent, should we not feel it more if he sometimes gave 



294 LESSING. 

us a little less of it, — if he would only not always deal 
out his wine by beer-measure 1 So thorough is the Ger- 
man mind, that might it not seem now and then to work 
quite through its subject, and expatiate in cheerful un- 
consciousness on the other side thereof? 

With all its merits of a higher and deeper kind, it 
yet seems to us that German literature has not quite 
satisfactorily answered that so long-standing question 
of the French Abbe about esprit. Hard as it is for a Ger- 
man to be clear, still harder to be light, he is more than 
ever awkward in his attempts to produce that quality of 
style, so peculiarly French, which is neither wit nor 
liveliness taken singly, but a mixture of the two that 
must be drunk while the effervescence lasts, and will 
not bear exportation into any other language. German 
criticism, excellent in other respects, and immeasurably 
superior to that of any other nation in its constructive 
faculty, in its instinct for getting at whatever principle 
of life lies at the heart of a work of genius, is seldom 
lucid, almost never entertaining. It may turn its 
light, if we have patience, into every obscurest cranny 
of its subject, one after another, but it never flashes 
light out of the subject itself, as Sainte-Beuve, for ex- 
ample, so often does, and with such unexpected charm. 
We should be inclined to put Julian Schmidt at the head 
of living critics in all the more essential elements of his 
outfit ; but with him is not one conscious at too fre- 
quent intervals of the professorial grind, — of that Ger- 
man tendency to bear on too heavily, where a French 
critic would touch and go with such exquisite measure 1 
The Great Nation, as it cheerfully calls itself, is in 
nothing greater than its talent for saying little things 
agreeably, which is perhaps the very top of mere cul- 
ture, and in literature is the next best thing to the power 
of saying great things as easily as if they were little. 



LESSING. 295 

German learning, like the elephants of Pyrrhus, is 
always in danger of turning upon what it was intended 
to adorn and reinforce, and tramj^ling it ponderously to 
death. And yet what do we not owe it ? Mastering 
all languages, all records of intellectual man, it has been 
able, or has enabled others, to strip away the husks of 
nationality and conventionalism from the literatures of 
many races, and to disengage that kernel of human 
truth which is the germinating principle of them all. 
Nay, it has taught us to recognize also a certain value 
in those very husks, whether as shelter for the unripe or 
food for the fallen seed. 

That the general want of style in German authors is 
not wholly the fault of the language is shown by Heine 
(a man of mixed blood), who can be daintily light in 
German ; that it is not altogether a matter of race, is 
clear from the graceful airiness of Erasmus and Reuch- 
lin in Latin, and of Grimm in French. The sense of 
heaviness which creeps over the reader from so many 
German books is mainly due, we' susjDect to the lan- 
guage, which seems wellnigh incapable of that aerial per- 
spective so delightful in first-rate French, and even 
English, writing. But there must also be in the national 
character an insensibility to proportion, a want of that 
instinctive discretion which we call tact. Nothing short 
of this will account for the perpetual groping of German 
imaginative literature after some foreign mould in which 
to cast its thought or feeling, now trying a Louis Qua- 
torze pattern, then something supposed to be Shake- 
spearian, and at last going back to ancient Greece, or 
even Persia. Goethe himself, limpidly perfect as are 
many of his shorter poems, often fails in giving artistic 
coherence to his longer works. Leaving deeper quali- 
ties wholly out of the question, Wilhelm Meister seems 
a mere aggi'egation of episodes if compared with such a 



296 LESSING. 

masterpiece as Paul and Virginia, or even witli a happy 
improvisation like the Vicar of Wakefield. The second 
part of Faust, too, is rather a reflection of Geothe's 
own changed view of life and man's relation to it, than 
an harmonious completion of the original conception. 
Full of placid wisdom and exquisite poetry it certainly 
is ; but if we look at it as a poem, it seems more as if 
the author had striven to get in all he could, than to 
leave out all he might. We cannot help asking what 
business have paper money and political economy and 
geognosy here 1 We confess that Thales and the Ho- 
munculus weary us not a little, unless, indeed, a poem be 
nothing, after all, but a prolonged conundrum. Many 
of Schiller's lyrical poems — though the best of them 
find no match in modern verse for rapid energy, the 
very axles of language kindling with swiftness — seem 
disproportionately long in parts, and the thought too 
often has the life wellnigh squeezed out of it in the 
sevenfold coils of diction, dappled though it be with 
splendid imagery. 

In German sentiment, which runs over so easily into 
sentimentalism, a foreigner cannot help being struck with 
a certain incongruousness. What can be odder, for ex- 
ample, than the mixture of sensibility and sausages in 
some of Goethe's earlier notes to Frau von Stein, unless, 
to be sure, the publishing them 1 It would appear that 
Germans were less sensible to the ludicrous — and we 
are far from saying that this may not have its compen- 
satory advantages — than either the English or the 
French. And what is the source of this sensibility, if it 
be not an instinctive perception of the incongruous and 
disproportionate 1 Among all races, the English has 
ever shown itself most keenly alive to the fear of mak- 
ing itself ridiculous ; and among all, none has produced 
so many humorists, only one of them, indeed, so pro- 



LESSING. 297 

found as Cervantes, yet all masters in their several ways. 
What English-speaking man, except Boswell, could have 
arrived at Weimar, as Goethe did, in that absurd Wei^tker- 
montirung ? And where, out of Germany, could he have 
found a reigning Grand Duke to put his whole court into 
the same sentimental livery of blue and yellow, leather 
breeches, boots, and all, excepting only Herder, and that 
not on account of his clerical profession, but of his age 1 
To be sure, it might be asked also where else in Europe 
was a prince to be met with capable of manly friendship 
with a man whose only decoration was his genius 1 But 
the comicality of the other fact no less remains. Certainly 
the German character is in no way so little remarkable 
as for its humor. If we were to trust the evidence of 
Herr Hub's dreary Deutsche komische und humoristische 
Dichtung^ we should believe that no German had even 
so much as a suspicion of what humor meant, unless the 
book itself, as we are half inclined to suspect, be a joke 
in three volumes, the ivant of fun being the real point 
thereof If German patriotism can be induced to find a 
grave delight in it, we congratulate Herr Hub's publish- 
ers, and for ourselves advise any sober-minded man who 
may hereafter " be merry," not to " sing psalms," but to 
read Hub as the more serious amusement of the two. 
There are epigrams there that make life more solemn, 
and, if taken in sufficient doses, would make it more pre- 
carious. Even Jean Paul, the greatest of German hu- 
morous authors, and never surpassed in comic conception 
or in the pathetic quality of humor, is not to be named 
with his master, Sterne, as a creative humorist. What 
are Siebenkas, Fixlein, Schmelzle, and Fibel, (a single 
lay-figure to be draped at will with whimsical sentiment 
and reflection, and put in various attitudes,) compared 
with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his brother 
Toby, characters which we do not see merely as puppets 
13* 



298 LESSING. 

in the author's mind, but poetically projected from it in 
an independent being of their own 1 Heine himself, the 
most graceful, sometimes the most touching, of modern 
poets, and clearly the most easy of German humorists, 
seems to me wanting in a refined perception of that in- 
ward propriety which is only another name for poetic 
proportion, ■and shocks us sometimes with an Unfldthig- 
Jceit, as at the end of his DeutscMand^ which, if it make 
Germans laugh, as we should be sorry to believe, makes 
other people hold their noses. Such things have not 
been possible in English since Swift, and the pevBijieur 
Heine cannot offer the same excuse of savage cynicism 
that might be pleaded for the Irishman. 

I have hinted that Herr Stahr's Life of Lessing is 
not precisely the kind of biography that would have 
been most pleasing to the man who could not conceive 
that an author should be satisfied with anything more 
than truth in praise, or anything less in criticism. My 
respect for what Lessing w^as, and for what he did, is 
profound. In the history of literature it would be hard 
to find a man so stalwart, so kindly, so sincere,* so ca- 
pable of great ideas, whether in their influence on the in- 
tellect or the life, so unswervingly true to the truth, so free 
from the common weaknesses of his class. Since Luther, 
Germany has given birth to no such intellectual athlete, 
— to no son so German to the core. Greater poets she 
has had, but no greater writer ; no nature more finely tem- 
pered. Nay, may we not say that great character is as 
rare a thing as great genius, if it be not even a nobler 
form of it % For surely it is easier to embody fine think- 
ing, or delicate sentiment, or lofty aspiration, in a book 
than in a life. The w^ritten leaf, if it be, as some few 
are, a safe-keeper and conductor of celestial fire, is se- 

* " If I write at all, it is not possible for me to write otherwise than 
just as I tliiiilc and feel." — Lessing to his fathei-, 21st December, 1767. 



LESSING. 299 

cure. Poverty cannot pinch, passion swerve, or trial 
shake it. But the man Lessing, harassed and striving 
Hfe-long, always poor and always hopeful, with no patron 
but his own right-hand, the very shuttlecock of fortune, 
who saw ruin's ploughshare drive through the hearth 
on which his first home-fire was hardly kindled, and who, 
through all, was faithful to himself, to his friend, to his 
duty, and to his ideal, is something more inspiring for 
us than the most glorious utterance of merely intellec- 
tual power. The figure of Goethe is grand, it is right- 
fully pre-eminent, it has something of the calm, and 
something of the coldness, of the immortals ; but the 
Valhalla of German letters can show one form, in its 
sim2:)le manhood, statelier even than his. 

Manliness and simplicity, if they are not necessary 
coefficients in producing character of the purest tone, 
were certainly leading elements in the Lessing who is 
still so noteworthy and lovable to us wdien eighty-six 
years have passed since his bodily presence vanished 
from among men. He loved clearness, he hated exagger- 
ation in all its forms. He was the first German who 
had any conception of style, and who could be full with- 
out spilling over on all sides. Herr Stahr, we think, is 
not just the biographer he would have chosen for him- 
self. His book is rather a panegyric than a biography. 
There is sometimes an almost comic disproportion be- 
tween the matter and the manner, especially in the epic 
details of Lessing's onslaughts on the nameless herd of 
German authors. It is as if Sophocles should have given 
a strophe to every bullock slain by Ajax in his mad foray 
upon the Grecian commissary stores. He is too fond of 
striking an attitude, and his tone rises unpleasantly near 
a scream, as he calls the jDcrsonal attention of heaven 
and earth to something which Lessing himself would 
have thought a very matter-of-course affair. He who 



300 LESSING. 

lays it down as an axiom, that "genius loves simplicity," 
would hardly have been pleased to hear the "Letters on 
Literature " called the " burning thunderbolts of his an- 
nihilating criticism," or the Anti-Gotze pamphlets, " the 
hurtling arrows that sped from the bow of the immortal 
hero." Nor would he with whom accuracy was a matter 
of conscience have heard patiently that the Letters " ap- 
peared in a period distinguished for its lofty tone of 
mind, and in their own towering boldness they are a 
true picture of the intrepid character of the age."* If 
the age was what Herr Stahr represents it to have been, 
where is the great merit of Lessing? He would have 
smiled, we suspect, a little contemptuously, at Herr 
Stahr's repeatedly quoting a certificate from the " histo- 
rian of the proud Britons," that he was "the first critic 
in Europe." Whether we admit or not Lord Macaulay's 
competence in the matter, we are sure that Lessing 
would not have thanked his biographer for this soup- 
ticket to a ladleful of fame. If ever a man stood firmly 
on his own feet, and asked help of none, that man was 
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. 

Herr Stahr's desire to make a hero of his subject, and 
his love for sonorous sentences lilce those we have 
quoted above, are apt to stand somewhat in the way of 
our chance at taking a fair measure of the man, and see- 
ing in what his heroism really lay. He furnishes little 
material for a comparative estimate of Lessing, or for 
judging of the foreign influences which helped from time 
to time in making him what he was. Nothing is harder 
than to worry out a date from Herr Stahr's haystacks 
of praise and quotation. Yet dates are of special value 

* " I am sure that Kleist would rather have taken another wound 
with him into his grave than have such stuff jabbered over him {sich 
soldi Zeug nachschwatzen lassen).'" Lessing to Gleim, 6th September, 
1759. 



LESSING. 301 

in tracing the progress of an intellect like Lessing's, 
which, little actuated bj an inward creative energy, was 
commonly stirred to motion by the impulse of other 
minds, and struck out its brightest flashes by collision 
with them. He himself tells us that a critic should 
" first seek out some one with whom he can contend," 
and quotes in justification from one of Aristotle's com-. 
mentatoYS, So let A7^tstotel€s qiccerere pugnam in siiis libris. 
This Lessing was always wont to do. He could only feel 
his own strength, and make others feel it, — could only 
call it into full play in an intellectual wrestling-bout. 
He was always anointed and ready for the ring, but with 
this distinction, that he was no mere prize-fighter, or 
bully for the side that would pay him best, nor even a 
contender for mere sentiment, but a self-forgetful cham- 
pion for the truth as he saw it. Nor is this true of him 
only as a critic. His more purely imaginative works — - 
his Minna, his Emilia, his Nathan — were all written, 
not to satisfy the craving of a poetic instinct, nor to rid 
head and heart of troublous guests by building them a 
lodging outside himself, as Goethe used to do, but to 
prove some thesis of criticism or morals by which Truth 
could be served. His zeal for her was perfectly unselfish. 
*' Does one write, then, for the sake of being always in 
the right? I think I have been as serviceable to Truth," 
he says, " when I miss her, and my failure is the occa- 
sion of another's discovering her, as if I had discovered 
her myself" * One would almost be inclined to think, 
from Herr Stahr's account of the matter, that Lessing 
had been an autochthonous birth of the German soil, 
without intellectual ancestry or helpful kindred. That 
this is the sufiicient natural history of no original mind 
we need hardly say, since originality consists quite as 
much in the power of using to purpose what it finds 

* Letter to Klotz, 9th June, 1766. 



302 LESSING. 

V 

ready to its hand, as in that of producing what is abso- 
lutely new. Perhaps we might say that it was nothing 
more than the faculty of combining the separate, and 
therefore ineffectual, conceptions of others, and making 
them into living thought by the breath of its own organ- 
izing si3irit. A great man without a past, if he be not 
an impossibility, will certainly have no future. He 
would be like those conjectural Miltons and Crom wells 
of Gray's imaginary Hamlet. The only privilege of the 
original man is, that, like other sovereign princes, he 
has the right to call in the current coin and reissue it 
stamped with his own image, as was the practice of 
Lessing. 

Herr Stahr's over-intensity of phrase is less offensive 
than amusing when applied to Lessing's early efforts in 
criticism. Speaking of poor old Gottsched, he says : 
" Lessing assailed him sometimes with cutting criticism, 
and again with exquisite humor. In the notice of Gott- 
sched's poems, he says, among other things, 'The exte- 
rior of the volume is so handsome that it will do great 
credit to the bookstores, and it is to be hoped that it 
will continue to do so for a long time. But to give a 
satisfactory idea of the interior surpasses our powers.' 
And in conclusion he adds, ' These poems cost two tha- 
lers and four groschen. The two thalers pay for the 
ridiculous, and the four groschen pretty much for the 
useful.'" Again, he tells us that Lessing concludes his 
notice of Klopstock's Ode to God " with these inimitably 
roguish words : ' What presumption to beg thus ear- 
nestly for a woman ! ' Does not a whole book of criticism 
lie in these nine words 1 " For a young man of twenty- 
two, Lessing's criticisms show a great deal of indepen- 
dence and maturity of thought; but humor he never had, 
and his wit was always of the bluntest, — crushing 
rather than cutting. The mace, and not the scymitar, 



LESSING. 303 

was his weapon. Let Herr Stahr put all Lessing's " in- 
imitably roguish words " together, and compare them 
with these few intranslatable lines from Voltaire's letter 
to Rousseau, thanking him for his Discours sur Vliie- 
galite : "On n'a jamais employe tant d'esprit a vouloir 
nous rendre betes; il prendenviede marcher ^quatrepattes 
quand on lit votre ouvrage." Lessing from the first was 
something far better than a wit. Force was always 
much more characteristic of him than cleverness. Some- 
times Herr Stahr's hero-worship leads him into positive 
misstatement. For example, sjDeaking of Lessing's Pref- 
ace to the " Contributions to the History and Reform 
of the Theatre," he tells us that " his eye was directed 
chiefly to the English theatre and Shakespeare." Less- 
ing at that time (1749) was only twenty, and knew little 
more than the names of any foreign dramatists except 
the French. In this very Preface his English list skips 
from Shakespeare to Dryden, and in the Spanish he 
omits Calderon, Tirso de Molina, and Alarcon. Accord- 
ingly, we suspect that the date is wrongly assigned to 
Lessing's translation of Toda la Vida es Suefio. His 
mind was hardly yet ready to feel the strange charm of 
this most imaginative of Calderon's dramas. 

Even where Herr Stahr undertakes to give us light on 
the sources of Lessing, it is something of the dimmest. 
He attributes " Miss Sara Sampson " to the influence 
of the " Merchant of London," as Mr. Evans translates 
it literally from the German, meaning our old friend, 
"George Barnwell." But we are strongly inclined to 
suspect from internal evidence that Moore's more recent 
" Gamester " gave the prevailing impulse. And if Herr 
Stahr must needs tell us anything of the Tragedy of 
Middle-Class Life, he ought to have known that on the 
English stage it preceded Lillo by more than a century, 
— witness the " Yorkshire Tragedy," — and that some- 



tl 



304- LESSING. 

thing very like it was even much older in France. We 
are inclined to complain, also, that he does not bring 
out more clearly how much Lessing owed to Diderot both 
as dramatist and critic, nor give us so much as a hint of 
what already existing English criticism did for him in 
the way of suggestion and guidance. But though we 
feel it to be our duty to say so much of Herr Stahr's 
positive faults and negative short-comings, yet we leave 
him in very good humor. While he is altogether too 
full upon certain points of merely transitory importance, 
— such as the quarrel with Klotz, — yet we are bound 
to thank him both for the abundance of his extracts 
from Lessing, and for the j ndgment he has shown in the 
choice of them. Any one not familiar with his writings 
will be able to get a very good notion of the quality of 
his mind, and the amount of his literary performance, 
from these volumes ; and that, after all, is the chief 
matter. As to the absolute merit of his works other 
than critical, Herr Stahr's judgment is too much at the 
mercy of his partiality to be of great value. 

Of Mr. Evans's translation we can speak for the most 
part with high commendation. There are great diffi- 
culties in translating German prose ; and whatever other 
good things Herr Stahr may have learned from Lessing, 
terseness and clearness are not among them. We have 
seldom seen a translation which read more easily, or was 
generally more faithful. That Mr. Evans should nod 
now and then we do not wonder, nor that he should 
sometimes choose the wrong word. We have only com- 
pared him with the original where we saw reason for I 
suspecting a slip ; but, though we have not found much 
to complain of, we have found enough to satisf3'' us that 
his book will gain by a careful revision. We select a few 
oversights, mainly from the first volume, as examples. 
On page 34, comparing Lessing with Goethe on arriving 



i 



LESSING. 305 

at the University, Mr. Evans, we think, obscures, if he 
does not wholly lose the meaning, when he translates 
Lehen by " social relations," and is altogether wrong in 
rendering Patrizier by " aristocrat." At the top of the 
next page, too, " suspicious " is not the word for heden- 
Mich. Had he been writing English, he would surely 
have said " questionable." On page 47, " overtrodden 
shoes " is hardly so good as the idiomatic " down at the 
heel." On page 104, " A very humorous representation " 
is oddly made to " confirm the documentary evidence." 
The reverse is meant. On page 115, the sentence be- 
ginning " the tendency in both " needs revising. On 
page 138, Mr. Evans speaks of the '* Poetical Village- 
younker of Destouches." This, we think, is hardly the 
English of Le Poete Campagnard, and almost recalls 
Lieberkiihn's theory of translation, toward which Les- 
sing was so unrelenting, — " When I do not understand 
a passage, why, I translate it word for word." On page 
149, "Miss Sara Sampson" is called " the first social 
tragedy of the German Drama." All tragedies surely 
are social, except the " Prometheus." Burgerliche Ti^a- 
godie means a tragedy in which the protagonist is taken 
from common life, and perhaps cannot be translated 
clearly into English except by " tragedy of middle-class 
life." ' So on page 170 we find Emilia Galotti called a 
" Virginia hourgeoise^'' and on page 1 72 a hospital be- 
comes a lazaretto. On page 190 we have a sentence end- 
ing in this strange fashion : " in an episode of the Eng- 
lish original, which Wieland omitted entirely, one of its 
characters nevertheless appeared in the German tragedy." 
On page 205 we have the Seven Years' War called " a 
bloody iwocessP This is mere carelessness, for Mr. 
Evans, in the second volume, translates it rightly " Uiw- 
Buitr What English reader would know what " You are 
intriguing me " meo.ns, on page 228 % On page 2G4, 



306 LESSING. 



Vol. 11. , we find a passage inaccurately rendered, which 
we consider of more consequence, because it is a quota- 
tion from Lessing. " 0, out upon the man who claims, 
Almighty God, to be a preacher of Thy word, and yet so 
impudently asserts that, in order to attain Thy purposes, 
there was only one way in w^hich it pleased Thee to make 
Thyself known to him ! " This is very far from nur den 
einzigen Weg gehaht den Du Dir gef alien lassen ihm Icund 
zu machen I The ihm is scornfully emphatic. We hope 
Professor Evans will go over his version for a second 
edition much more carefully than we have had any occa- 
sion to do. He has done an excellent service to our lit- 
erature, for which we heartily thank him, in choosing a 
book of this kind to translate, and translating it so well. 
We would not look such a gift horse too narrowly in the 
mouth. 

Let us now endeavor to sum up the result of Les- 
sing's life and labor with what success we may. 

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born (January 22, 
1729) at Camenz, in Upper Lusatia, the second child 
and eldest son of John Gottfried Lessing, a Lutheran 
clergyman. Those who believe in the persistent qual- 
ities of race, or the cumulative property of culture, 
will find something to their purpose in his Saxon blood 
and his clerical and juristic ancestrj^ It is worth men- 
tioning, that his grandfather, in the thesis for his doc- 
tor's degree, defended the right to entire freedom of 
religious belief The name first comes to the surface in 
Parson Clement Lessigk, nearly three centuries ago, and 
survives to the present day in a painter of some distinc- 
tion. It has almost passed into a proverb, that the 
mothers of remarkable children have been something 
beyond the common. If there be any truth in the the- 
ory, the case of Lessing was an exception, as might have 
been inferred, perhaps, from the peculiarly masculine 



■ 



LESSING. 307 

t3^pe of his character and intellect. His mother was in 
no wise superior, but his father seems to have been a 
man somewhat above the pedantic average of the pro- 
vincial clergymen of his day, and to have been a scholar 
in the ampler meaning of the word. Besides the clas- 
sics, he had possessed himself of French and English, 
and was somewhat versed in the Oriental languages. 
The temper of his theology may be guessed from his hav- 
ing been, as his son tells us with some pride, one of " the 
earliest translators of Tillotson." We can only conjec- 
ture him from the letters which Lessing wrote to him, 
from which we should fancy him as on tlie whole a de- 
cided and even choleric old gentleman, in whom the wig, 
though not a predominant, was yet a notable feature, 
and who was, like many other fathers, permanently 
astonished at the fruit of his loins. He would have 
preferred one of the so-called learned professions for his 
son, — theology above all, — and would seem to have 
never quite reconciled himself to his son's distinction, 
as being in none of the three careers which alone were 
legitimate. Lessing's bearing towards him, always in- 
dependent, is really beautiful in its union of respectful 
tenderness with unswerving self-assertion. When he 
wished to evade the maternal eye, Gotthold used in his 
letters to set up a screen of Latin between himself and 
her ; and we conjecture the worthy Pastor Primarius 
playing over again in his study at Camenz, with some 
scruples of conscience, the old trick of Chaucer's fox : — 

"Mulier est hominis confusio; 
Madam, the sentence of this Latin is, 
Woman is mannes joy and mannes bliss." 

He appears to have snatched a fearful and but ill-con- 
cealed joy from the sight of the first collected edition 
of his son's works,' imlike Tillotson as they certainly 
were. Ah, had they only been Opera ! Yet were they 



308 LESSING. 

not volumes, after all, and able to stand on their OTvn 
edges beside the immortals, if nothing more 1 

After grinding with private-tutor Mylius the requisite 
time, Lessing entered the school of Camenz, and in his : 
thirteenth year was sent to the higher institution at 
Meissen. We learn little of his career there, except 
that Theophrastus, Plautus, and Terence were already 
his favorite authors, that he once characteristically dis- 
tinguished himself by a courageous truthfulness, and 
that he wrote a Latin poem on the valor of the Saxon 
soldiers, which his father very sensibly advised him to 
shorten. In 1750, four years after leaving the school, 
he writes to his father : " I believed even when I was at 
Meissen that one must learn much there which he can- 
not make the least use of in real life (de?^ Welt), and I 
now [after trying Leipzig and Wittenberg] see it all the 
more clearly," — a melancholy observation which many 
other vouno- men have made under similar circumstances. 
Sent to Leipzig in his seventeenth year, he finds himself 
an awkward, ungainly lad, and sets diligently to perfect- 
ing himself in the somewhat unscholastic accomplish- 
ments of riding, dancing, and fencing. He also sedulously 
frequents the theatre, and wrote a play, " The Young 
Scholar," which attained the honor of representation. 
Meanwhile his most intimate companion was a younger 
brother of his old tutor Mylius, a young man of more 
than questionable morals, and who had even written a 
satire on the elders of Camenz, for which — over-confi- 
dently trusting himself in the outraged city — he had 
been fined and imprisoned ; so little could the German 
Muse, celebrated by Klopstock for her swiftness of foot, 
protect her son. AYith this scandalous person and with 
play-actors, more than probably of both sexes, did theBJ 
young Lessing share a Christmas cake sent him by his 
mother. Such news was not long in reaching Camenz, 



LESSING. 309 

and we can easily fancy how tragic it seemed in the 
little parsonage there, to what cabinet councils it gave 
rise in the paternal study, to what ominous shaking of 
the clerical wig in that domestic Olympus. A pious 
fraud is practised on the boy, who hurries home thinly 
clad through the winter weather, his ill-eaten Christmas 
cake wringing him with remorseful indigestion, to receive 
the last blessing, if such a prodigal might hope for it, 
of a broken-hearted mother. He finds the good dame 
in excellent health, and softened toward him by a cold 
he has taken on his pious journey. He remains at home 
several months, now writing Anacreontics of such warmth 
that his sister (as volunteer representative of the com- 
mon hangman) burns them in the family stove ; now 
composing sermons to convince his mother that " he 
could be a preacher any day," — a theory of that sacred 
office unhappily not yet extinct. At Easter, 1747, he 
gets back to Leipzig again, with some scant supply 
of money in his pocket, but is obliged to make his es- 
cape thence between two daj^s somewhere toward the 
middle of the next year, leaving behind him some his- 
trionic debts (chiefly, we fear, of a certain Mademoiselle 
Lorenz) for which he had confidingly made himself se- 
curity. Stranded, by want of floating or other capital, 
at Wittenberg, he enters himself, with help from home, 
as a student there, but soon migrates again to Berlin, 
which had been his goal when making his hegira from 
Leipzig. In Berlin he remained three years, applying 
himself to his chosen calling of author at all work, by 
doing whatever honest job offered itself, — verse, crit- 
icism, or translation, — and profitably studious in a very 
wide range of languages and their literature. Above 
all, he learned the great secret, which his stalwart 
English contemporary, Johnson, also acquired, of being 
able to " dine heartily " for threepence. 



310 LESSING. 

Meanwhile he continues in a kind of colonial depend- 
ence on the parsonage at Camenz, the bonds gradually 
slackening, sometimes shaken a little rudely, and always 
giving alarming hints of approaching and inevitable au- 
tonomy. From the few home letters of Lessing which 
remain, (covering the period before 1753, there are only 
eight in all,) we are able to surmise that a pretty con- 
stant maternal cluck and shrill paternal warning were 
kept up from the home coop. We find Lessing defend- 
ing the morality of the stage and his own private mor- 
als against charges and suspicions of his parents, and 
even making the awful confession that he does not con- 
sider tl:H3 Christian religion itself as a thino^ " to be taken 
on trust," nor a Christian by mere tradition so valuable 
a member of society as " one who has prudently doubted, 
and by the way of examination has "arrived at conviction, 
or at least striven to arrive." Boyish scepticism of the 
superficial sort is a common phenomenon enough, but 
the Lessing variety of it seems to us sufficiently rare in 
a youth of twenty. What strikes us mainly in the let- 
ters of these years is not merely the maturity they show, 
though that is remarkable, but the tone. We see already 
in them the cheerful and never overweening self-confi- 
dence which always so pleasantly distinguished Lessing, 
and that strength of tackle, so seldom found in literary 
men, which brings the mind well home to its anchor, en- 
abling it to find holding-ground and secure riding in any 
sea. " What care I to live in plenty," he asks gayly, 
" if I only live % " Indeed, Lessing learned early, and 
never forgot, that whoever Avould be life's master, and 
not its drudge, must make it a means, and never allow it 
to become an end. He could say more truly than 
Goethe, Mein Acher ist die Zeit, since he not only sowed 
in it the seed of thought for other men and other times, 
but cropped it for his daily bread. Above all, we find 



■ LESSING. 311 

Lessmg even thus early endowed with the power of 
keeping his eyes wide open to what he was after, to what 
would helj) or hinder him, — a much more singular gift 
than is commonly supposed. Among other jobs of this 
first Berlin period, he had undertaken to arrange the 
library of a certain Herr Riidiger, getting therefor his 
meals and " other receipts," whatever they may have 
been. His father seems to have heard with anxiety that 
this arrangement had ceased, and Lessing writes to him : 
" I never wished to have anything to do with this old 
man longer than until I had made myself thoroughly ac- 
quainted with his great library. This is now accom- 
plished, and we have accordingly parted." This was in 
his twenty-first year, and we have no doubt, from the 
range of scholarship which Lessing had at command so 
young, that it was perfectly true. All through his life 
he was thoroughly German in this respect also, that he 
never quite smelted his knowledge clear from some slag 
of learning. 

In the early part of the first Berlin residence. Pastor 
Primarius Lessing, hearing that his son meditated a 
movement on Vienna, was much exercised with fears of 
the temptation to Popery he would be exposed to in that 
capital. AVe suspect that the attraction thitherward 
had its source in a perhaps equally catholic, but less 
theological magnet, — the Mademoiselle Lorenz above 
mentioned. Let us remember the perfectly innocent 
passion of Mozart for an actress, and be comforted. 
There is not the slightest evidence that Lessing's life at 
this time, or any other, though careless, was in any way 
debauched. No scandal was ever coupled with his name, 
nor is any biographic chemistry needed to bleach spots 
out of his reputation. What cannot be said of Wieland, 
of Goethe, of Schiller, of Jean Paul, may be safely af- 
firmed of this busy and single-minded man. The pa- 



312 LESSING, 



I 



rental fear of Popery brought him a seasonable supply 
of money from home, which enabled him to clothe 
himself decently enough to push his literary fortunes, 
and put on a bold front with publishers. Poor enough 
he often was, but never in so shabby a pass that he was 
forced to write behind a screen, like Johnson. 

It was during this first stay in Berlin that Lessing was 
brought into personal relations with Voltaire. Through 
an acquaintance with the great man's secretaiy, Bichier, 
he was employed as translator in the scandalous Hirschel 
law^suit, so dramatically set forth by Carlyle in his Life 
of Erederick, though Lessing's share in it seems to have 
been unknown to him. The service could hardly have 
been other than distasteful to him ; but it must have 
been with some thrill of the anche io I kind that the 
poor youth, just fleshing his maiden pen in criticism, 
stood face to face w'ith the famous author, with whose 
name all Europe rang from side to side. This was in 
February, 1751. Young as he was, we fancy those cool 
eyes of his making some strange discoveries as to the 
real nature of that lean nightmare of Jesuits and 
dunces. Afterwards the same secretary lent him the 
manuscript of the Siecle de Louis XIV., and Lessing 
thoughtlessly taking it into the country with him, it w^as 
not forthcoming when called for by the author. Vol- 
taire naturally enough danced with rage, screamed all 
manner of unpleasant things about robbery and the 
like, cashiered the secretary, and was, we see no reason 
to doubt, really afraid of a pirated edition. This time 
his cry of wolf must have had a quaver of sincerity in it. 
Herr Stahr, who can never keep separate the Lessing as 
he then was and the Lessing as he afterwards became, 
takes fire at what he chooses to consider an unworthy 
suspicion of the Frenchman, and treats himself to some 
rather cheap indignation on the subject. For ourselves, 



LESSING. 313 

we think Voltaire altogether in the right, and we respect 
Lessing's honesty too much to suppose, with his biogra- 
pher, that it was this which led him, years afterwards, 
to do such severe justice to Merope^ and other tragedies 
of the same author. The affair happened in December, 
1751, and a year later Lessing calls Voltaire a "great 
man," and says of his Amalie, that "it has not only 
beautiful passages, it is beautiful throughout, and the 
tears of a reader of feeling will justify our judgment." 
Surely there is no resentment here. Our only wonder 
would be at its being written after the Hirschel business. 
At any rate, we cannot allow Herr Stahr to shake our 
faith in the sincerity of Lessing's motives in criticism, — 
he could not in the soundness of the criticism itself, — 
by tracing it up to a spring at once so petty and so 
personal. 

During a part of 1752,* Lessing was at Wittenberg 
again as student of medicine, the parental notion of a 
strictly professional career of some kind not having yet 
been abandoned. We must give his father the credit of 
having done his best, in a well-meaning paternal fashion, 
to make his son over again in his own image, and to 
thwart the design of nature by coaxing or driving him 
into the pinfold of a prosperous obscurity. But Gott- 
hold, with all his gifts, had no talent whatever for con- 
tented routine. His was a mind always in solution, 
which the divine order of things, as it is called, could 
not precipitate into any of the traditional forms of crys- 

* Herr Stahr heads the fifth chapter of his Second Book, " Lessing 
at Wittenberg, December, 1751, to November, 1T52." But we never 
feel quite sure of his dates. Tlae Ricliier affair puts Lessing in BerUn 
in December, 1751, and he toolv his Master's degree at Wittenberg, 
29th April, 1752. We are told that he finally left Wittenberg " toward 
the end " of that year. He himself, writing from Berlin in 1754, says 
that he has been absent from that city nur ein halbes Jalir since 1748. 
There is only one letter for 1752, dated at Wittenberg, 9th June. 
14 



314 LESSING- 

tallizatlon, and in which the time to come was already 
fermenting. The principle of gi'owth was in the yonng 
literary hack, and he must obey it or die. His was to 
the last a naturct naturans, never a naturata. Lessing 
seems to have done what he could to be a dutiful fail- 
ure. But there was something in him stronger and 
more sacred than even filial piety ; and the good old 
pastor is remembered now only as the father of a son 
who would have shared the benign oblivion of his own 
theological works, if he could only have had his wise 
way with him. Even after never so many biographies 
and review articles, genius continues to be a marvellous 
and inspiring thing. At the same time, considering the 
then condition of what was pleasantly called literature 
in Germany, there was not a little to be said on the pa- 
ternal side of the question, though it may not seem now 
a very heavy mulct to give up one son out of ten to 
immortality, — at least the Fates seldom decimate in 
this way. Lessing had now, if we accept the common 
standard in such matters, "completed his education," 
and the result may be summed up in his own words to 
Michaelis, 16th October, 1754 : "I have studied at the 
Fiirstenschule at Meissen, and after that at Leipzig and 
Wittenberg. But I should be greatly embarrassed if I 
were asked to tell ivliatP As early as his twentieth 
year he had arrived at some singular notions as to the 
uses of learning. On the 20th of January, 1749, he 
writes to his mother : " I found out that books, indeed, 
would make me learned, hut never make me a man.'''' 
Like most men of great knowledge, as distinguished 
from mere scholars, he seems to have been always a 
rather indiscriminate reader, and to have been fond, as 
Johnson was, of " browsing " in libraries. Johnson nei- 
ther in amplitude of literature nor exactness of scholar- 
ship could be deemed a match for Lessing ; but they 



LESSING. 315 

were alike in the power of readily applying whatever 
they had learned, whether for purposes of illustration or 
argument. They resemble each other, also, in a kind of 
absolute common-sense, and in the force with which they 
could plant a direct blow with the whole weight both of 
their training and their temperament behind it. As a 
critic, Johnson ends where Lessing begins. The one is 
happy in the lower region of the understanding : the 
other can breathe freely in the ampler air of reason 
alone. Johnson acquired learning, and stopped short 
from indolence at a certain -point. Lessing assimilated 
it, and accordingly his education ceased only with his 
life. Both had something of the intellectual sluggish- 
ness that is apt to go with great strength ; and both had 
to be baited by the antagonism of circumstances or 
opinions, not only into the exhibition, but into the pos- 
session of their entire force. Both may be more properly 
called original men than, in the highest sense, original 
writers. 

From 1752 to 1760, with an interval of something 
over two years spent in Leipzig to be near a good thea- 
tre, Lessing was settled in Berlin, and gave himself 
wholly and earnestly to the life of a man of letters. A 
thoroughly healthy, cheerful nature he most surely had, 
with something at first of the careless light-heartedness 
of youth. Healthy he was not always to be, not always 
cheerful, often very far from light-hearted, but manly 
from first to last he eminently was. Downcast he could 
never be, for his strongest instinct, invaluable to him 
also as a critic, was to see things as they really are. 
And this not in the sense of a cynic, but of one who 
measures himself as well as his circumstances, — who 
loves truth as the most beautiful of all things and the 
only permanent possession, as being of one substance 
with the soul. In a man like Lessing, whose character 



316 LESSING. 

is even more interesting than his works, the tone and 
turn of thought are what we hke to get gUmpses of. 
And for this his letters are more helpful than those of 
most authors, as might be expected of one who said of 
himself, that, in his more serious work, " he must profit 
by his first heat to accomplish anything." He began, 
we say, light-heartedlj^ He did not believe that "one 
should thank God only for good things." " He who is 
only in good health, and is willing to work, has nothing 
to fear in the world." " What another man would call 
want, I call comfort." " Must not one often act thought- 
lessly, if one would provoke Fortune to do something 
for him?" In his first inexperience, the hfe of "the 
sparrow on the house-top " (which we find oddly trans- 
lated "roof") was the one he would choose for himself. 
Later in life, when he wished to marry, he was of another 
mind, and perhaps discovered that there was something 
in the old father's notion of a fixed position. " The life 
of the sparrow on the housetop is only right good if one 
need not expect any end to it. If it cannot always last, 
every day it lasts too long," — he writes to Ebert in 
1770. Yet even then he takes the manly view. " Ev- 
erything in the world has its time, everything may be 
overlived and overlooked, if one only have health." 
Nor let any one suppose that Lessing, full of courage as 
he was, found professional authorship a garden of Alci- 
noiis. From creative literature he continually sought 
refuge, and even repose, in the driest drudgery of mere 
scholarship. On the 26th of April, 1768, he writes to 
his brother with something of his old gayety : " Thank 
God, the time will soon come when I cannot call a penny 
in the world my own but I must first earn it. I am un- 
happy if it must be by writing." And again in May, 
1771 : "Among all the wretched, I think him the most 
v.retched who must work with his head, even if he is 



LESSING. 317 

not conscious of having one. But what is the good of 
complaining 1 " Lessing's life, if it is a noble example, 
so far as it concerned himself alone, is also a warning 
when another is to be asked to share it. He too would 
have profited had he earlier learned and more constantly 
borne in mind the profound wisdom of that old saying, 
Si sit jn'udentia. Let the young poet, however he may 
believe of his art that " all other pleasures are not worth 
its pains," consider well what it is to call down fire from 
heaven to keep the pot boiling, before he commit him- 
self to a life of authorship as something fine and easy. 
That fire will not condescend to such office, though it 
come without asking on ceremonial days to the free ser- 
vice of the altar. 

Lessing, however, never would, even if he could, have 
so desecrated his better powers. For a bare livelihood, 
he always went sturdily to the market of hack-work, 
where his learning would fetch him a price. But it was 
only in extremest need that he would claim that benefit 
of clergy. '"^ I am worried," he writes to his brother 
Karl, 8th April, 1773, "and work because working is 
the only means to cease being so. But you and Voss 
are very much mistaken if you think that it could ever 
be indifferent to me, under such circumstances, on what 
I work. Nothing less true, whether as respects the 
work itself or the principal object wherefor I work. I 
have been in my life before now in very wretched cir- 
cumstances, yet never in such that I would have written 
for bread in the true meaning of the word. I have be- 
gun my ' Contributions ' because this work helps me 
.... to live from one day to another." It is plain that 
he does not call this kind of thing in any high sense 
writing. Of that he had far other notions ; for though 
he honestly disclaimed the title, yet his dream was al- 
wa^^s to be a poet. But he was willing to work, as he 



31S LESSING. 

claimed to be, because he had one ideal higher than that 
of being a j^oet, namel}^, to be thoroughly a man. To 
Nicolai he writes in 1758 : "All ways of earning his 
bread are alike becoming to an honest man, whether to 
split w^ood or to sit at the helm of state. It does not 
concern his conscience how useful he is, but how useful 
he would be." Goethe's poetic sense was the Minotaur 
to which he sacrificed everything. To make a study, he 
would soil the maiden petals of a woman's soul ; to get 
the delicious sensation of a reflex sorrow, he would wring 
a heart. All that saves his egoism from being hateful 
is, that, with its immense reaches, it cheats the sense 
into a feeling of something like sublimity. A patch of 
sand is unpleasing ; a desert has all the awe of ocean. 
Lessing also felt the duty of self-culture ; but it was not 
so much for the sake of feeding fat this or that faculty 
as of strengthening character, — the only soil in which 
real mental power can root itself and find sustenance. 
ITis advice to his brother Karl, who was beginning to 
write for the stage, is two parts moral to one literarv. 
" Study ethics diligently, learn to express yourself well 
and correctly, and cultivate your own character. "With- 
out that I cannot conceive a good dramatic author." 
Marvellous counsel this will seem to those who think 
that wisdom is only to be found in the fool's j)aradise 
of Bohemia ! 

"We said that Lessing's dream was to be a poet. In 
comparison with success as a dramatist, he looked on all 
other achievement as inferior in kind. In 17G7 he 
writes to Gleim (speaking of his call to Hamburg) : 
" Such circumstances were needed to rekindle in me an 
almost extinguished love for the theatre. I was just be- 
ginning to lose myself in other studies which would 
have made me unfit for any work of genius. My 
Laoco'On is now a secondary labor." And yet he never 



LESSING. 319 

fell into the mistake of overvaluing what he valued so 
highly. His unflinching common-sense would have 
saved him from that, as it afterwards enabled him to see 
that something w^as wanting in him which must enter 
into the making of true poetrj^, whose distinction from 
prose is an inward one of nature, and not an outward 
one of form. While yet under thirty, he assures Men- 
delssohn that he was quite right in neglecting poetry for 
philosophy, because " only a part of our 3'outh should 
be given up to the arts of the beautiful. We must jDrac- 
tise ourselves in weightier things before w^e die. An old 
man, who lifelong has done nothing but rhyme, and an old 
man who lifelong has done nothing but pass his breath 
through a stick with holes in it, — I doubt much whether 
such an old man has arrived at what he was meant for." 
This period of Lessing's life was a productive one, 
though none of its jjrinted results can be counted of 
permanent value, except his share in the " Letters on 
German Literature." And even these must be reckoned 
as belonging to the years of his apprenticeship and 
trainino; for the master-workman he afterwards became. 
The small fry of authors and translators were hardly 
fitted to call out his full strength, but his vivisection of 
them taught him the value of certain structural princi- 
ples. " To one dissection of the fore quarter of an ass," 
says Hay don in his diary, " I owe my information." 
Yet even in his earliest criticisms we are struck with the 
same penetration and steadiness of judgment, the same 
firm grasp of the essential and permanent, that w^ere 
afterwards to make his opinions law in the courts of 
taste. For example, he says of Thomson, that, " as a 
dramatic poet, he had the fault of never knowing when to 
leave oft' ; he lets every character talk so long as anything 
can be said ; accordingly, during these prolonged con- 
versations, the action stands still, and the story becomes 



320 LESSING. 

tedious." Of *' Roderick Random," he says that '' its 
author is ueither a Richardson nor a Fielding ; he is one 
of those writers of whom there are plenty among the 
Germans and French." We cite these merely because 
their firmness of tone seems to us uncommon in a youth 
of twenty-four. In the " Letters," the range is much 
wider, and the apj)lication of principles more consequent. 
He had already secured for himself a position among the 
literary men of that day, and was beginning to be feared 
for the inexorable justice of his criticisms. His " Fa- 
bles " and his " Miss Sara SamjDson " had been trans- 
lated into French, and had attracted the attention of 
Grimm, who says of them (December, 1754) : "These 
Fables commonly contain in a few lines a new and pro- 
found moral meaning. M. Lessing has much wit, genius, 
and invention ; the dissertations which follow the Fables 
prove moreover that he is an excellent critic." In Ber- 
lin, Lessing made friendships, especially with Men- 
delssohn, Von Kleist, Nicolai, Gleim, and Ramler. For 
Mendelssohn and Yon Kleist he seems to have felt a real 
love ; for the others at most a liking, as the best ma- 
terial that could be had. It certainly was not of the 
juiciest. He seems to have worked hard and played 
hard, equally at home in his study and Baumann's wine- 
cellar. He was busy, poor, and happy. 

But he was restless. We susjDect that the necessity 
of forever picking uj) crumbs, and their occasional 
scarcity, made the life of the sparrow on the house-top 
less agreeable than he had expected. The imagined free- 
dom was not quite so free after all, for necessity is as 
short a tether as dejtendence, or official duty, or what 
not, and the regular occupation of grub-hunting is as 
tame and wearisome as another. Moreover, Lessing had 
probably by this time sucked his friends dry of any in- 
tellectual stimulus they could yield him; and when 



LESSING. 321 

friendship reaches that pass, it is apt to be anything but 
inspiring. Except Mendelssohn and Yon Kleist, they 
were not men capable of rating him at his true value ; 
and Lessing was one of those who always burn up the 
fuel of life at a fearful rate. Admirably dry as the sup- 
j)lies of Ramler and the rest no doubt were, they had 
not substance enough to keep his mind at the high tem- 
perature it needed, and he would soon be driven to the 
cutting of green stuff from his own wood-lot, more rich 
in smoke than fire. Besides this, he could hardly have 
been at ease among intimates most of whom could not 
even conceive of that intellectual honesty, that total dis- 
regard of all personal interests where truth was concerned, 
which was an innate quality of Lessing's mind. Their 
theory of criticism was, Truth, or even worse if jDossible, 
for all who do not belong to our set ; for us, that deli- 
cious falsehood which is no doubt a slow poison, but 
then so very slow. Their nerves were unbraced by that 
fierce democracy of thought, tramj^ling on all prescrij)- 
tion, all tradition, in which Lessing loved to shoulder his 
way and advance his insupportable foot. " What is 
called a heretic," he saj^s in his Preface to Berengarius, 
" has a very good side. It is a man who at least wishes 
to see with his own eyes." And again, " I know not if 
it be a duty to offer up fortune and life to the truth ; 
.... but I know it is a duty, if one undertake to teach 
the truth, to -teach the whole of it, or none at all." 
Such men as Gleim and Ramler were mere dilettanti, 
and could have no notion how sacred his convictions are 
to a militant thinker like Lessing. His creed as to the 
rights of friendship in criticism might be put in the 
words of Selden, the firm tread of whose mind was like 
his own : " Opinion and affection extremely differ. 
Opinion is something wherein I go about to give reason 

why all the world should think as I think. Affection is 
14* u 



322 LESSING. 

a thing wherein I look after the pleasing of myself" 
How little his friends were capable of appreciating this 
view of the matter is plain from a letter of Ramler to 
Gleim, cited by Herr Stahr. Lessing had shown up the 
weaknesses of a certain work by the Abbe Batteux (long 
ago gathered to his literary fathers as conclusively as 
poor old Ramler himself), without regard to the impor- 
tant fact that the Abbe's book had been translated by a 
friend. Horrible to think of at best, thrice horrible 
when the friend's name was Ramler ! The impression 
thereby made on the friendly heart may be conceived. 
A ray of light penetrated the rather opaque substance 
of Herr Ramler's mind, and revealed to him the danger- 
ous character of Lessing. " I know well," he says, 
" that Herr Lessing means to speak his own opinion, 
and " — what is the dreadful inference 1 — " and, by 
suppressing others, to gain air, and make room for him- 
self This disposition is not to be overcome." * For- 
tunately not, for Lessing's opinion always meant some- 
thing, and was worth having. Gleim no doubt sympa- 
thized deeply with the sufterer by this treason, for he 
too had been shocked at some disrespect for La Fontaine, 
as a disciple of whom he had announced himself. 

Berlin was hardly the place for Lessing, if he could 
not take a step in any direction without risk of treading 
on somebody's gouty foot. This was not the last time 
that he was to have experience of the fact that the critic's 
pen, the more it has of truth's celestial temper, the more 
it is apt to reverse the miracle of the archangel's S2:)ear, 
and to bring out whatever is toadlike in the nature of 
him it touches. We can well imderstand the sadness 

with which he said, 

" Der Blick des Forscher's fand 
Nicht selten mehr als er zu finden wiinschte." 

* " Ramler," writes Georg Forster, " ist die Ziererei, die Eigenliebe, 
die Eitelkeit in eigener Person." 



LESSING. 323 

Here, better than anywhere, we may cite something 
which he wrote of himself to a friend of Klotz. Les- 
sing, it will be remembered, had literally '' supj)ressed " 
Klotz. " What do you apprehend, then, from me 1 The 
more faults and errors you point out to me, so mucli 
the more I shall learn of you ; the more I learn of 

you, the more thankful shall I be I wish you 

knew me more thoroughly. If the opinion you have 
of my learning and genius (Geist) should perhaps 
suffer ^hereby, yet I am sure the idea I would like 
you to form of my character would gain. I am not 
the insufferable, unmannerly, proud, slanderous man 
Herr Klotz proclaims me. It cost me a great deal 
of trouble and comjDulsion to be a little bitter against 
him." * Ramler and the rest had contrived a nice 
little society for mutual admiration, much like that 
described by Goldsmith, if, indeed, he did not con- 
vey it from the French, as was not uncommon with 
him. " ' What, have you never heard of the ad- 
mirable Brandellius or the ingenious Mogusius, one 
the eye and the other the heart of our University, 
known all over the world ? ' ' Never,' cried the travel- 
ler ; ' but pray inform me what Brandellius is particu- 
larly remarkable for.' 'You must be little acquainted 
with the republic of letters,' said the other, ^to ask such 
a question. Brandellius has written a most sublime 
panegyric on Mogusius.' 'And, prithee, what has Mo- 
gusius done to deserve so great a favor 1 ' ' He has 
written an excellent poem in praise of Brandellius.' " 
Lessing: was not the man who could narrow himself to 
the proportions of a clique ; lifelong he was the terror 
of the Brandellii and Mogusii, and, at the signal given 
by him, 

* Lessing to Von Murr, 25tli November, 1768. The whole letter is 
well worth reading. 



324 LESSISG. 

Tn bfCTies? to irxirpa.*-* Eardi'* giint «o?3s, 
Ko'w ie** than imsiiletC •i'S'arT* in nasrow rocfm 
Tkrocig nmiiberic**-" 

Beades whatexer other reas/jns Leasing mar hare had 
fJ>r leaving Berlin, we fanev that his haying exhausted 
whatever means it had of helping his spiritoal growth 
was the ehie£ 2> ine years later, he gave as a reason fijr 
not wishing to stay long in Bronswick, ~ Z^ot that I do 
not like ^^unswick, but because nothing comes of being 
long in a place which one likca"* Whatercr the resk- 
scm, Ij^stsdnvj in 1760, left Berlin for ^K-eslan, where the 
poet of aeeretaiT had been oSered him nnder FrederidE's 
toogh old General Tanentzien. " I wHl spin myself in 
for a while like an i^j worm, that I maj be aUe to 
ccme to li^it ajgain as a Ivilliant winged creatnre,'' sajs 
hisdiaij. Shortly after his kaying Berlin, he was 
chosoi a member of the Academy of Sciences there. 
Herr Stahr, who has no little fimdneas for the foot-li^it 
^le of i^uase, says, " It may easily be imagined that 
he himself r^arded his appointment as an insult rather 
than as an honor." Lessing himself merely says that it 
was a matter of indifference to him, which is mnch more 
in keejHi^ with his character and with the y^oe of the 
intended honor. 

The Seven Years' War began four years hefore Leasing 
took np his abode in Bres^sm, and it may be a^^ how 
he, as a Saxon, was affected by it. We m^^t answer, 
Jtardl^ at alL His position was that of armed neu- 
trality. JjoDg ago at Leipzig he had been accused of 
Prossian leanings; now in Bcxlin he was thoi^lit too 
Saxon. Thoogfa he disclaimed aaxy such sentiment as 

* A tkroate plnase of Iris, whicli l^bert las puiaei i eJ fer vs wifli 
its Saaum accent, was^ Es hamml dtdk madd Meg kermma^ iiup l jin g 
tint fine nd^ do awnrthirrig better iar a con^bmcj tlon sfaearaig 



LESSING. 325 

patriotism, and called himself a cosmopolite, it is plain 
enough that his position was simply that of a German. 
Love of country, except in a very narrow parochial way, 
was as impossible in Germany then as in America during 
the Colonial period. Lessing himself, in the latter years 
of his life, was librarian of one of those petty princelets 
who sold their subjects to be shot at in America, — 
creatures strong enough to oppress, too weak to protect 
their people. Whoever would have found a Germany to 
love must ha,ve pieced it together as painfully as Isis 
did the scattered bits of Osiris. Yet he says that "the 
true patriot is by no means extinguished " in him. It 
was the noisy ones that he could not abide; and, writing 
to Gleim about his " Grenadier " verses, he advises him 
to soften the tone of them a little, he himself being a "de- 
clared enemy of imprecations," which he would leave al- 
together to the clergy. We think Herr Stahr makes too 
much of these anti-patriot flings of Lessing, which, with 
a single exception, occur in his letters to Gleim, and with 
reference to a kind of verse that could not but be dis- 
tasteful to him, as needing no more brains than a drum, 
nor other inspiration than serves a trumpet, Lessing 
undoubtedly had better uses for his breath than to spend 
it in shouting for either side in this " bloody lawsuit," 
as he called it, in which he was not concerned. He 
showed himself German enough, and in the right wa^^ 
in his persistent warfare against the tyranny of Frencli 
taste. 

He remained in Breslau the better part of five years, 
studying life in new phases, gathering a library, which, 
as commonly happens, he afterwards sold at great loss, 
and writing his Minna and his Laocoon. He accompa- 
nied Tauentzien to the siege of Schweidnitz, where Fred- 
erick was present in person. He seems to have lived a 
rather free-and-easy life during his term of office, kept 



326 ^ LESSING. 

shockingly late hours, and learned, among other things, 
to o-amble, — a fact for T\'hich Herr Stahr thinks it need- 
fill to account in a high philosophical fashion. We pre- 
fer to think that there are some motives to which re- 
markable men are liable in common with the rest of 
mankind, and that they may occasionally do a thing 
merely because it is pleasant, without forethought of 
medicinal benefit to the mind. Lessing's friends (whose 
names were not, as the reader might be tempted to sup- 
pose, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) expected him to make 
something handsome out of his office ; but the pitiful 
result of those five years of opportunity was nothing 
more than an immortal book. Unthrifty Lessing, to 
have been so nice about your fingers, (and so near the 
mint, too,) when your general was wise enough to make 
his fortune ! As if ink-stains were the only ones that 
would wash out, and no others had ever been covered 
with white kid from the sight of all reasonable men! In 
July, 1764, he had a violent fever, which he turned to 
account in his usual cheerful way : " The serious epoch 
of my life is drawing nigh. I am beginning to become 
a man, and flatter myself that in this burning fever I 
have raved away the last remains of my youthful follies. 
Fortunate illness ! " He had never intended to bind him- 
self to an official career. To his father he writes : "I have 
more than once declared that my present engagement 
could not continue long, that I have not given up my 
old plan of living, and that I am more than ever resolved 
to withdraw from any service that is not wholly to my 
mind. I have passed the middle of my life, and can 
think of nothing that could compel me to make mj^self a 
slave for the poor remainder of it. I write you this, 
dearest father, and must write you this, in order that 
you may not be astonished if, before long, you should 
see me once more very far removed from all hopes of, or 



LESSING. 327 

claims to, a settled prosperity, as it is called." Before 
the middle of the next year he was back in Berlin again. 
There he remained for nearly two years, trying the 
house-top way of life again, but with indifferent success, 
as we have reason to think. Indeed, when the metaphor 
resolves itself into the plain fact of living just on the 
other side of the roof, — in the garret, namely, — and 
that from hand to mouth, as was Lessing's case, we need 
not be surprised to find him gradually beginning to see 
something more agreeable in a fixirtes Glilck than he had 
once been willing to allow. At any rate, he was willing, 
and even heartily desirous, that his friends should suc- 
ceed in getting for him the place of royal librarian. But 
Frederick, for some unexplained reason, would not ap- 
point him. Herr Stahr thinks it had something to do 
with the old Steele manuscript business. But this seems 
improbable, for Voltaire's wrath was not directed against 
Lessing ; and even if it had been, the great king could 
hardly have carried the name of an obscure German au- 
thor in his memory through all those anxious and war- 
like years. Whatever the cause, Lessing early in 1767 
accepts the position of Theatrical Manager at Hamburg, 
as usual not too much vexed with disappointment, but 
quoting gayly 

" Quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio." 

Like Burns, he was always " contented wi' little and 
canty wi' mair." In connection with his place as Man- 
ager he was to write a series of dramatic essays and crit- 
icisms. It is to this we owe the Dramatui^gie, — next 
to the Laocoon the most valuable of his works. But 
Lessing — though it is plain that he made his hand as 
light as he could, and wrapped his lash in velvet — soon 
found that actors had no more taste for truth than au- 
thors. He was obliged to drop his remarks on the spe- 



o 



28 LESSING. 



cial merits or demerits of players, and to confine himself 
to those of the pieces rej)resented. By this his work 
gained in valne ; and the latter part of it, written with- 
out reference to a particular stage, and devoted to the 
discussion of those general principles of dramatic art on 
which he had meditated long and deeply, is far weightier 
than the rest. There are few men who can put forth 
all their muscle in a losing race, and it is characteristic 
of Lcssing that what he wrote under the dispiritment 
of failure should be the most lively and vigorous. Cir- 
cumstances might be against him, but he was incapable 
of believing that a cause could be lost which had once 
enlisted his conviction. 

The theatrical enterprise did not prosper long ; but 
Lessing had meanwhile involved himself as partner in a 
publishing business which harassed him while it lasted, 
and when it failed, as was inevitable, left him hampered 
with debt. Help came in his appointment (1770) to take 
charge of the Duke of Brunswick's library at Wolfenbiit- 
tel, with a salary of six hundred thalers a year. This 
was the more welcome, as he soon after was betrothed 
with Eva Konig, widow of a rich manufixcturer.* Her 
husband's affiiirs, however, had been left in confusion, 
and this, with Lessing's own embarrassments, prevented 
their being married till October, 1776. Eva Konig was 

* I find surprisingly little about Lessing in such of the contempo- 
rary correspondence of German literary men as I have read. A let- 
ter of Boie to Merck (10 April, 1775) gives us a glimpse of him. "Do 
you know that Lessing will probably marrj- Reiske's Avidow and come 
to Dresden in place of Hagedorn ? The restless spirit ! How he Avill 

get along with the artists, half of them, too, Italians, is to be seen 

Liffert and lie have met and parted good friends. He has worn ever 
since on his finger the ring with the skeleton and buttei-fly which Lif- 
fert gave him. He is i-eported to be much dissatisfied with the theat- 
rical filibustering of Goethe and Lenz, especially with the remarks on 
the drama in which so little respect is shown for his Aristotle, and the 
Leipzig folks are said to be gi-eatly rejoiced at getting such an ally." 



LESSING. 329 

every way worthy of him. Clever, womanly, discreet, 
with just enough coyness of the will to be charming 
when it is joined with sweetness and good sense, she was 
the true helpmate of such a man, — the serious compan- 
ion of his mind and the pla^^fellow of his affections. 
There is something infinitely refreshing to me in the 
love-letters of these two persons. Without wanting sen- 
timent, there is such a bracing air about them as breathes 
from the higher levels and strong-holds of the soul. 
They show that self-possession which can alone reserve 
to love the power of new self-surrender, — of never cloy- 
ing, because never wholly possessed. Here is no inva- 
sion and conquest of the weaker nature by the stronger, 
but an equal league of souls, each in its own realm still 
sovereign. Turn from such letters as these to those of 
St. Preux and Julie, and you are stifled with the heavy 
perfume of a demirep's boudoir, — to those of Herder to 
his Caroline, and you sniff no doubtful odor of profes- 
sional unction from the sermon-case. Manly old Dr. 
Johnson, who could be tender and true to a plain woman, 
knew very well what he meant when he wrote that sin- 
gle poetic sentence of his, — " The shepherd in Virgil 
grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him to be 
a native of the rocks." 

In January, 1778, Lessing's wife died from the effects 
of a difficult childbirth. The child, a boy, hardly sur- 
vived its birth. The few words wrung out of Lessing 
by this double sorrow are to me as deeply moving as any- 
thing in tragedy. " I wished for once to be as happy 
(es so gut hahen) as other men. But it has gone ill 
with me ! " " And I was so loath to lose him, this son ! " 
" My wife is dead ; and I have had this experience also. 
I rejoice that I have not many more such experiences 
left to make, and am quite cheerful." " If you had 
known her ! But they say that to praise one's wife is 



330 LESsma 

self-praise. Well, then, I say no more of her ! But if 
3^ou had known her ! " Quite cheerful 1 On the 10th of 
August he writes to Elise Reimarus, — he is writing to 
a woman now, an old friend of his and his wife, and will 
be less restrained : " I am left here all alone. I have 
not a single friend to whom I can wholly confide myself 
.... How often must I curse my ever wishing to be 
for once as happy as othet men ! How often have I 
wished myself back again in my old, isolated condition, 
— to be nothing, to wish nothing, to do nothing, but 
what the present moment brings with it ! .... Yet I 
am too proud to think myself unhappy. I just grind 
my teeth, and let the boat go as pleases wind and waves. 
Enough that I will not overset it myself" It is plain 
from this letter that suicide had been in his mind, and, 
with his antique way of thinking on many subjects, he 
would hardly have looked on it as a crime. But he was 
too brave a man to throw up the sjDonge to fate, and had 
work to do yet. Within a few days of his wife's death 
he wrote to Eschenburg : "I am right heartily ashamed 
if my letter betrayed the least despair. Despair is not 
nearly so much my failing as levity, wdiich often ex- 
presses itself with a little bitterness and misanthropy." 
A stoic, not from insensibility or cowardice, as so many 
are, but from stoutness of heart, he blushes at a mo- 
ment's abdication of self command. And he will not 
roil the clear memory of his love with any tinge of the 
sentimentality so much the fashion, and to be had so 
cheap, in that generation. There is a moderation of sin- 
cerity peculiar to Lessing in the epithet of the following 
sentence : " How dearly must 1 pay for the single year 
I have lived with a sensible wdfe ! " Werther had then 
been published four years. Lessing's grief has that pa- 
thos which he praised in sculpture, — he may writhe, 
but he must not scream. Nor is this a new thing with 



LESSING- 331 

him. On the death of a younger brother, he wrote to 
his father, fourteen years before : '' Why should those 
who grieve communicate their grief to each other pur- 
posely to increase if? ... . Many mourn in death what 
they loved not living. I will love in life what nature 
bids me love, and after death strive to bewail it as little 
as I can." 

We think Herr Stahr is on his stilts again when he 
speaks of Lessing's position at Wolfenbiittel. He calls 
it an "assuming the chains of feudal service, being 
buried in a corner, a martyrdom that consumed the best 
powers of his mind and crushed him in body and spirit 
forever." To crush forever is rather a strong phrase, 
Herr Stahr, to apj)ly to the spirit, if one must ever give 
heed to the sense as well as the sound of what one is 
writing. But eloquence has no bowels for its victims. 
We have no doubt the Duke of Brunswick meant well 
by Lessing, and the salary he paid him was as large as 
he would have got from the frugal Frederick. But one 
whose trade it was to be a Duke could hardly have had 
much sympath}" with his librarian after he had once found 
out what he really was. For even if he was not, as Herr 
Stahr affirms, a republican, and we doubt very much if 
he was, yet he was not a man who could play with ideas 
in the light French fashion. At the ardent touch of 
his sincerity, they took fire, and grew dangerous to what 
is called the social fabric. The logic of wit, with its 
momentary flash, is a very different thing from that con- 
sequent logic of thought, pushing forv;ard its deliberate 
sap day and night with a fixed object, which belonged to 
Lessing. The men who attack abuses are not so much 
to be dreaded by the reigning house of Superstition as 
those who, as Dante says, syllogize hateful truths. As 
for " the chains of feudal service," they might serve a 
Fenian Head-Centre on a pinch, but are wholly out of 



332 LESSING. 

place here. The slavery that Lessing had really taken 
on him was that of a great library, an Alcina that could 
always too easily witch him away from the more serious 
duty of his genius. That a mind like his could be 
buried in a corner is mere twaddle, and of a kind that 
has done great wrong to the dignity of letters. Where- 
ever Lessing sat, was the head of the table. That he 
suffered at Wolfenbiittel is true ; but was it nothing to 
be in love and in debt at the same time, and to feel that 
his fruition of the one must be postponed for uncertain 
3^ears by his own folly in incurring the other % If the 
sparrow-life must end, surely a wee bush is better than 
nae beild. One cause of Lessing's occasional restless- 
ness and discontent Herr Stahr has failed to notice. It 
is evident from many passages in his letters that he had 
his share of the hypochondria which goes with an im- 
aginative temperament. But in him it only serves to 
bring out in stronger relief his deep-rooted manliness. 
He spent no breath in that melodious whining which, 
beginning with Rousseau, has hardly yet gone out of 
fashion. Work of some kind was his medicine for the 
blues, — if not always of the kind he would have chosen, 
then the best that was to be had ; for the useful, too, 
had for him a sweetness of its own. Sometimes he 
found a congenial labor in rescuing, as he called it, the 
memory of some dead scholar or thinker from the wrongs 
of ignorance or prejudice or falsehood ; sometimes in 
fishing a manuscript out of the ooze of oblivion, and 
giving it, after a critical cleansing, to the world. Now 
and then he warmed himself and kept his muscle in 
trim with buffeting soundly the champions of that shal- 
low artificiality and unctuous wordiness, one of which 
passed for orthodox in literature, and the other in the- 
ology. True religion and creative genius were both so 
beautiful to him that he could never abide the mediocre 



LESSING. 333 

counterfeit of either, and he who put so much of his 
own Hfe into all he wrote could not but hold all scripture 
sacred in which a divine soul had recorded itself. It 
would be doing Lessing great wrong to confound his con- 
troversial writing with the paltry quarrels of authors. 
His own personal relations enter into them surprisingly 
little, for his quarrel was never with men, bat with 
falsehood, cant, and misleading tradition, in whomsoever 
incarnated. Save for this, they were no longer reada- 
ble, and might be relegated to that herbarium of Bil- 
lingsgate gathered by the elder Disraeli. 

So far from being " crushed in spirit " at Wolfenbiit- 
tel, the years he spent there were among the most pro- 
ductive of his life. "Emilia Galotti," begun in 1758, 
was finished there and published in 1771. The contro- 
versy with Gotze, by far the most important he was en- 
gaged in, and the one in which he put forth his maturest 
powers, was carried on thence. His " Nathan the Wise " 
(1779), by which almost alone he is known as a poet 
outside of Germany, was conceived and composed there. 
The last few years of his life were darkened by ill-health 
and the depression which it brings. His Nathan had 
not the success he hoped. It is sad to see the strong, 
self-sufficing man casting about for a little sympathy, 
even for a little praise. "It is really needful to me that 
3^ou should have some small good opinion of it [Nathan], 
in order to make me once more contented with myself," 
he writes to Elise Reimarus in May, 1779. That he was 
weary of polemics, and dissatisfied with himself for let- 
ting them distract him from better things, appears from 
his last pathetic letter to the old friend he loved and 
valued most, — Mendelssohn. " And in truth, dear 
friend, I sorely need a letter like yours from time to 
time, if I am not to become wholly out of humor. I 
think you do not know me as a man that has a very lict 



334 LESSING. 

hunger for praise. Bat the coldness with which the 
world is wont to convince certain people that they do 
not suit it, if not deadly, yet stiffens one with chill. I 
am not astonished that all I have written lately does not 

please you At best, a passage here and there may 

have cheated you by recalling our better days. I, too, 
was then a sound, slim sapling, and am now such a rot- 
ten, gnarled trunk ! " This was written on the 19th of 
December, 1780; and on the 15th of Februarj^, 1781, 
Lessing died, not quite fifty-two years old. Goethe was 
then in his thirty-second year, and Schiller ten years 
younger. 

Of Lessing's relation to metaphysics the reader will 
find ample discussion in HeiT Stahr's volumes. We are 
not particularly concerned with them, because his in- 
terest in such questions was purely speculative, and 
because he was more concerned to exercise the powers 
of his mind than to analyze them. His chief business, 
his master impulse always, was to be a man of letters in 
the narrower sense of the term. Even into theology he 
only made occasional raids across the border, as it were, 
and that not so much with a purpose of reform as in 
defence of principles which applied equally to the whole 
domain of thought. He had even less sympathy with 
heterodoxy than with orthodoxy, and, so far from join- 
ing a party or wishing to form one, would have left 
belief a matter of choice to the individual conscience. 
" From the bottom of my heart I hate all those people 
who wish to found sects. For it is not error, but sec- 
tarian error, yes, even sectarian truth, that makes men 
unhappy, or would do so if truth would found a sect." * 
Again he says, that in his theological controversies he is 
'^ much less concerned about theology than about sound 

* To his brother Karl, 20th April, 1774. 



I 



LESSING. 335 

common-sense, and only therefore prefer the old ortho- 
dox (at bottom tolerant) theology to the new (at bottom 
intolerant), because the former openly conflicts with 
somid common-sense, while the latter would fain corrupt 
it. I reconcile myself with my open enemies in order 
the better to be on my guard against my secret ones." * 
At another time he tells his brother that he has a wholly 
false notion of his (Lessing's) relation to orthodoxy. 
" Do you suppose I grudge the world that anybody 
should seek to enlighten it? — that I do not heartily 
wish that every one should think rationally about relig- 
ion ? I should loathe myself if even in my scribblings 
I had any other end than to help forward those great 
views. But let me choose my own way, which I think 
best for this purpose. And what is simpler than this 
way ? I would not have the impure water, which has 
long been unfit to use, preserved ; but I would not have 
it thrown away before we know whence to get purer. 
.... Orthodoxy, thank God, we were pretty well done 
with ; a partition-wall had been built between it and Phi- 
losophy, behind which each could go her own way with- 
out troubling the other. But what are they doing now ? 
They are tearing down this wall, and, under the pretext 
of making us rational Christians, are making us very 

irrational philosophers We are agreed that our 

old religious system is false ; but I cannot say with 3^ou 
that it is a patchwork of bunglers and half-philosophers. 
I know nothing in the world in which human acuteness 
has been more displayed or exercised than in that."t 
Lessing was always for freedom, never for looseness, of 
thought, still less for laxity of principle. But it must 
be a real freedom, and not that vain struggle to become 
a majority, which, if it succeed, escapes from heresy 

* To the same, 20th March, 1777. 
t To the same, 2d February, 1774. 



336 LESSING. 

only to make heretics of the other side. Ahire ad i^hires 
would with him have meant, not bodily but sjoiritual 
death. He did not love the fanaticism of innovation a 
whit better than that of conservatism. To his sane un- 
derstanding, both were equally hateful, as different masks 
of the same selfish bully. Coleridge said that toleration 
was impossible till indifference made it worthless. Les- 
sing did not wish for toleration, because that implies 
authority, nor could his earnest temper have conceived 
of indifference. But he thought it as absurd to regu- 
late opinion as the color of the hair. Here, too, he 
would have agreed with Selden, that "it is a vain 
thing to talk of an heretic, for a man for his heart can- 
not think any otherwise than he does think." Hen- 
Stahr's chapters on this point, bating a little exaltation 
of tone, are very satisfactory ; though, in his desire to 
make a leader of Lessing, he almost represents him as 
being what he shunned, • — the founder of a sect. The 
fact is, that Lessing only formulated in his own way a 
general movement of thought, and what mainly interests 
lis is that in him we see a layman, alike indifferent to 
clerisy and heresy, giving energetic and pointed utter- 
ance to those opinions of his class which the clergy are 
content to ignore so long as they remain esoteric. At 
present the world has advanced to where Lessing stood, 
while the Church has done its best to stand stock-still ; 
and it would be a curious were it not a melancholy spec- 
tacle, to see the indifference with which the laity look on 
while theologians thrash their wheatless straw, utterly 
unconscious that there is no longer any common term 
possible that could bring their creeds again to any point 
of bearing on the practical life of men. Fielding never 
made a profounder stroke of satire than in Squire West- 
ern's indignant "Art not in the pulpit now 1 When art 
got up there, I never mind what dost say." 



LESSING. 337 

As an author, Lessing began his career at a period 
"^hen we cannot say that German literature was at its 
lowest ebb, only because there had not yet been any 
flood-tide. That may be said to have begun with him. 
When we say German literature, we mean so much of it 
as has any interest outside of Germany. That part of 
the literary histories which treats of the dead waste and 
middle of the eighteenth century reads like a collection 
of obituaries, and were better reduced to the conciseness 
of epitaph, though the authors of them seem to find a 
melancholy pleasure, much like that of undertakers, in the 
task by which they live. Gottsched reigned supreme on 
the legitimate throne of dulness. In Switzerland, Bod- 
mer essayed a more republican form of the same author- 
ity. At that time a traveller reports eight hvmdred 
authors in Zurich alone ! Young aspirant for lettered 
fame, in imagination clear away the lichens from their 
forgotten headstones, and read humbly the " As I am, 
so thou must be," on all ! Ever3'body remembers how 
Goethe, in the seventh book of his autobiography, tells 
the story of his visit to Gottsched. He enters by mis- 
take an inner room at the moment when a frightened 
servant brings the discrowned potentate a periwig large 
enough to reach to the elbows. That awful emblem of 
pretentious sham seems to be the best type of the liter- 
ature then predominant. We always fancy it set upon 
a pole, like Gessler's hat, with nothing in it that was not 
wooden, for all men to bow down before. The perivrig 
style had its natural place in the age of Louis XIV., 
and there were certainly brains under it. But it had 
run out in France, as the tie-wig style of Pope had in 
England. In Germany it was the mere imitation of an 
imitation. Will it be believed that Gottsched recom- 
mends his Art of Poetry to beginners, in preference to 
Breitinger's, because it ^^ will enable them to jjroduce every 
15 V 



338 LESSING. 

species of xtoem in a correct style, while out of that no one 
can learn to make an ode or a cantata " % " Whoever," 
he says, "buys Breitinger's book m order to learn how to 
mcd-e 2^oems, will too late regret his money."* Gott- 
sched, perhaps, did some service even by his advocacy 
of French models, by calling attention to the fact that 
there was such a thing as style, and that it was of some 
consequence. But not one of the authors of that time 
can be said to survive, nor to be known even by name ex- 
cept to Germans, unless it be Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, 
and Gellert. And the latter's immortality, such as it is, 
reminds us somewhat of that Lady Gosling's, w^hose obit- 
uary stated that she was " mentioned by Mrs. Barbauld 
in her Life of Richardson ' under the name of Miss M., 
afterwards Lady G.'" Klopstock himself is rather re- 
membered for what he was than what he is, — an im- 
mortality of unreadableness ; and w^e much doubt if 
many Germans put the " Oberon " in their trunks when 
they start on a journey. Herder alone survives, if 
not as a contributor to literature, strictly so called, yet 
as a thinker and as part of the intellectual impulse 
of the day. But at the time, though there were two 
parties, yet within the lines of each there was a loyal 
reciprocity of what is called on such occasions appre- 
ciation. Wig ducked to wdg, each blockhead had a 
brother, and there v,^as a universal apotheosis of the 
mediocrity of our set. If the greatest happiness of the 
greatest number be the true theory, this was all that 
could be desired. Even Lessing at one time looked up 
to Hagedorn as the German Horace. If Hagedorn were 
pleased, w^hat mattered it to Horace 1 Worse almost 
than this was the universal pedantry. The solemn bray 
of one pedagogue was taken up and prolonged in a thou- 
sand echoes. There was not only no originality, but no 
* Gervinus, IV. 62. 



LESSING. 339 

desire for it, — perhaps even a dread of it, as something 
that would break the entente coixliale of placid mutual 
assurance. No great writer had given that tone of good- 
breeding to the language which would gain it entrance 
to the society of European literature. No man of genius 
had made it a necessity of polite culture. It was still 
as rudely provincial as the Scotch of Allan Ramsay. 
Frederick the Great w^as to be forgiven if, with his prac- 
tical turn, he gave himself wholly to French, wdiich had 
replaced Latin as a cosmopolitan tongue. It had light- 
ness, ease, fluency, elegance, — in short, all the good 
qualities that German lacked. The study of French 
models was perhaps the best thing for German literature 
before it got out of long-clothes. It was bad only when 
it became a tradition and a tyranny. Lessing did more 
than any other man to overthrow this foreign usurpa- 
tion when it had done its work. 

The same battle had to be fought on English soil also, 
and indeed is hardly over yet. For the renewed out- 
break of the old quarrel between Classical and Romantic 
grew out of nothing more than an attempt of the mod- 
ern sph'it to free itself from laws of taste laid down 
by the Grand Siecle. But we must not forget the 
debt which all modern prose literature owes to France. 
It is true that Machiavelli was the first to write 
with classic pith and point in a living language ; but 
he is, for all that, properly an ancient. Montaigne 
is really the first modern writer, — the first who as- 
similated his Greek and Latin, and showed that an 
author might be original and charming, even classical, 
if he did not try too hard. He is also the first modern 
critic, and his judgments of the writers of antiquity are 
those of an equal. He made the ancients his servants, 
to help him think in Gascon French ; and, in spite of 
his endless quotations, began the crusade against ped- 



340 LESSING. 

antry. It was not, however, till a century later, tl. " - 
reform became com2:)lete in France, and then crossed u 
Channel. Milton is still a pedant in his prose, and not 
seldom even in his great poem. Dryden M^as the first 
Englishman who wrote perfectly easy prose, and he owed 
his style and turn of thought to his French reading. 
His learning sits easily on him, and has a modern cut. 
So far, the French influence was one of immixed good, 
for it rescued us from pedantry. It must have done 
something for Germany in the same direction. For its 
effect on poetry we cannot say as much ; and its tradi- 
tions had themselves become pedantry in another shape 
when Lessing made an end of it. He himself certainly 
learned to write prose of Diderot ; and whatever Herr 
Stahr may think of it, his share in the " Letters on Ger- 
man Literature " got its chief inspiration from France. 

It is in the DrawMturgie that Lessing first properly 
enters as an influence into European literature. He may 
be said to have begun the revolt from pseudo-classicism 
in poetry, and to have been thus unconsciously the 
founder of romanticism. Wieland's translation of Shake- 
speare had, it is true, appeared in 1762 ; but Lessing 
was the first critic whose pi'ofound knowledge of the 
Greek drama and ajDprehension of its principles gave 
weight to his judgment, who recognized in what the true 
greatness of the poet consisted, and found him to be 
really nearer the Greeks than any other modern. This 
was because Lessing looked always more to the life than 
the form, — because he knew the classics, and did not 
merely cant about them. But if the authority of Les- 
sing, by making people feel easy in their admiration for 
Shakespeare, perhaps increased the influence of his 
works, and if his discussions of Aristotle have given a 
new starting-point to modern criticism, it may be doubted 
whether the immediate cffbct on literature of his own 



LESSING. 341 

critical essays was so great as Herr Stahr supposes. 
Surely " Gotz " and " The Robbers " are nothing like 
what he would have called Shakespearian, and the whole 
Sturm und Drang tendency woidd have roused in him 
nothing but antipathy. Fixed principles in criticism 
are useful in helping us to form a judgment of works al- 
ready produced, but it is questionable whether they are 
not rather a hindrance than a help to living production. 
Ben Jonson was a fine critic, intimate with the classics 
as few men have either the leisure or the strength of 
mind to be in this age of many books, and built regular 
plays long before they were heard of in France. But he 
continually trips and falls flat over his metewand of 
classical propriety, his personages are abstractions, and 
fortunately neither his precepts nor his practice influ- 
enced any one of his greater coevals.* In breadth of un- 
derstanding, and the gravity of purpose that comes of 
it, he was far above Fletcher or Webster, but how far 
below either in the subtler, the incalculable, qualities of 
a dramatic poet ! Yet Ben, with his principles off, could 
soar and sing with the best of them ; and there are 
strains in his lyrics which Herrick, the most Catullian 
of poets since Catullus, could imitate, but never match. 
A constant reference to the statutes which taste has 
codified would only bewilder the creative instinct. Crit- 
icism can at best teach writers without genius what is to 
6e avoided or imitated. It cannot communicate life ; 

* It should be considered, by those sagacious persons who think 
that the most marveltous intellect of which we have any record could 
hot master so much Latin and Greek as would serve a sophomore, that 
Shakespeare must through conversation have possessed himself of 
whatever principles of art Ben Jonson and the other university men 
had been able to deduce from their study of the classics. That they 
should not have discussed these matters over their sack at the Mer- 
maid is incredible; that Shakespeare, who left not a drop in any 
orange he squeezed, could not also have got all the juice out of this 
one, is even more so. 



342 LESSING. 

and its effect, when reduced to rules, has commonly been 
to produce that correctness which is so praiseworthy and 
so intolerable. It cannot give taste, it can only demon- 
strate who has had it. Lessing's essays in this kind 
were of service to German literature by their manliness 
of style, whose example was worth a hundred treatises, 
and by the stimulus there is in all original thinking. 
Could he have written such a poem as he was capable of 
conceiving, his influence would have been far greater. 
It is the living soul, and not the metaphysical abstrac- 
tion of it, that is genetic in literature. If to do were 
as easy as to know what were good to be done ! It was 
out of his own failures to reach the ideal he saw so 
clearly, that Lessing drew the wisdom which made him 
so admirable a critic. Even here, too, genius can profit 
by no experience but its own. 

For, in spite of Herr Stahr's protest, we must ac- 
knowledge the truth of Lessing's own characteristic con- 
fession, that he was no poet. A man of genius he 
unquestionably was, if genius may be claimed no less for 
force than fineness of mind, — for the intensity of con- 
viction that insj)ires the understanding as much as for 
that apprehension of beauty which gives energy of will 
to imagination, — but a poetic genius he was not. His 
mind kindled by friction in the process of thinking, not 
in the flash of conception, and its delight is in demon- 
stration, not in bodying forth. His prose can leap and 
run, his verse is always thinking of its feet. Yet in his 
" Minna " and his " Emilia " * he shows one faculty of 

* In " Minna " and " Emilia " Lessing followed the lead of Diderot. 
In the Preface to the second edition of Diderot's Theatre, he says: " I 
am very conscious that my taste, without Diderot's example and 
teaching, would have taken quite another direction. Perhaps one 
more my own, yet hardly one with which my understanding would in 
the long run have been so well content." Diderot's choice of prose 
Avas dictated and justified by the accentual poverty of his mother- 



LESSING. 343 

the dramatist, that of construction, in a higher degree 
than any other German.* Here his critical deductions 
served him to some purpose. The action moves rapidly, 
there is no speechifying, and the parts are coherent. 
Both plays act better than anything of Goethe or Schil- 
ler. But it is the story that interests us, and not the 
characters. These are not, it is true, the incorporation 
of certain ideas, or, still worse, of certain dogmas, but 
they certainl}^ seem something like machines by which 
the motive of the play is carried on ; and there is noth- 
ing of that interplay of plot and character which makes 
Shakespeare more real in the closet than other drama- 
tists with all the helps of the theatre. It is a striking 
illustration at once of the futility of mere critical insight 
and of Lcssing's want of imagination, that in the Emilia 
he should have thought a Roman motive consistent with 
modern habits of thought, and that in Nathan he should 
have been guilty of anachronisms which violate not only 
the accidental truth of fact, but the essential truth of 

tongue. Lessing certainly revised his judgment on this point (for it 
was not equally applicable to German), and wrote his maturer "Na- 
than " in what he took for blank verse. There was much kindred be- 
tween the minds of the two men. Diderot always seems to us a kind 
of de1)oshed Lessing. Lessing was also indebted to Burke, Hume, the 
two Wartons, and Hurd, among other English writers. Not that he 
borrowed anything of them but the quickening of his own thought. It 
should be remembered that Eousseau was seventeen, Diderot and 
Sterne sixteen, and Winckelmann twelve years older than Lessing. 
AVieland was four years younger. 

* Goethe's appi*eciation of Lessing grew with his years. He writes 
to Lavater, 18th March, 1781: " Lessing's death has greatly dej^ressed 
me. I had much pleasure in him and much hope of him." This is a 
little patronizing in tone. But in the last year of his life, talking with 
Eckermann, he naturally antedates his admiration, as reminiscence is 
wont to do: " You can conceive what an effect this piece {Minna) had 
upon us young people. It was, in ftct, a shining meteor. It made us 
aware that something higher existed than anything whereof that feeble 
literary epoch had a notion. The first two acts are truly a masterpiece 
of exposition, from which one learned much and can always leax'n." 



344 LESSIXG, 

character. Even if we allowed him imagination, it must 
be only on the lower plane of prose ; for of verse as any- 
thing more than so many metrical feet he had not the 
faintest notion. Of that exquisite sympathy with the 
movement of the mind, with every swifter or slower 
pulse of passion, which proves it another species from 
prose, the very dcppodiTr) koI Xvpa of speech, and not 
merely a higher one, he wanted the fineness of sense to 
conceive. If we compare the prose of Dante or Milton, 
though both were eloquent, with their verse, we see at 
once which was the most congenial to them. Lessing 
has passages of freer and more harmonious utterance 
in some of his most careless prose essays, than can be 
found in his Nathan from the first line to the last. In 
the numeris lege solutis he is often snatched bej^ond him- 
self, and becomes truly dithyrambic ; in his pentameters 
the march of the thought is comparatively hampered 
and irresolute. His best things are not poetically deli- 
cate, but have the tougher fibre of proverbs. Is it not 
enough, then, to be a great prose-writer % They are as 
rare as gi-eat poets, and if Lessing have the gift to stir 
and to dilate that something deeper than the mind which 
genius only can reach, what matter if it be not done to 
music % Of his minor poems we need say little. Verse 
was alwaj^s more or less mechanical with him, and his 
epigrams are almost all stiff, as if they were bad trans- 
lations from the Latin. Many of them are shockingly 
coarse, and in liveliness are on a level with those of our 
Elizabethan j)eriod. Herr Stahr, of course, cannot bear 
to give them up, even though Gervinus be willing. The 
prettiest of his shorter poems {Die Namen) has been ap- 
propriated by Coleridge, who has given it a grace which 
it wants in the original. His Nathan, by a poor trans- 
lation of which he is chiefly known to English readers, 
is an Essay on Toleration in the form of a dialogue. As 



LESSING. 345 

a pla}^, it lias not the interest of Minna or Emilia, though 
the Germans, who have a praiseworthy national stoicism 
where one of their great writers is concerned, find in 
seeing it represented a grave satisfaction, like that of 
subscribing to a monument. There is a sober lustre of 
reflection in it that makes it very good reading ; but it 
wants the molten interfusion of thought and phrase 
which only imagination can achieve. 

As Lessing's mind was continually advancing, — always 
open to new impressions, and capable, as very few are, 
of apprehending the many-sidedness of truth, — as he 
had the rare quality of being honest with himself, — 
his works seem fragmentary, and give at first an im- 
pression of incompleteness. But one learns at length 
to recognize and value this very incompleteness as char- 
acteristic of the man who was growing lifelong, and to 
whom the selfish thought that any share of truth could 
be exclusively his was an impossibility. At the end of 
the ninety-fifth number of the Dramaturgie he says : " I 
remind my readers here, that these pages are by no 
means intended to contain a dramatic system. I am 
accordingly not bound to solve all the difficulties which 
I raise. I am quite willing that my thoughts should 
seem to want connection, — nay, even to contradict each 
other, — if only there are thoughts in which they [my 
readers] find material for thinking themselves. I wish 
to do nothing more than scatter the fermeiita cognitioiiis.''^ 
That is Lessing's great praise, and gives its chief value 
to his works, — a value, indeed, imperishable, and of 
the noblest kind. No writer can leave a more precious 
legacy to posterity than this; and beside this shining 
merit, all mere literary splendors look pale and cold. 
There is that life in Lessing's thought which engenders 
life, and not only thinks for us, but makes us think. 
Not sceptical, but forever testing and inquiring, it is 
15* 



346 LESSING. 

out of the cloud of his own doubt that the flash comes 
at last with sudden and vivid illumination. Flashes 
the J indeed are, his finest intuitions, and of very differ- 
ent quality from the equable north-light of the artist. He 
felt it, and said it of himself, " Ever so many flashes of 
lightning do not make daylight." We speak now of 
those more rememberable passages where his highest 
individuality reveals itself in what may truly be called 
a passion of thought. In the " Laocoon " there is day- 
light of the serenest temper, and never was there a bet- 
ter example of the discourse of reason, though even 
that is also a fragment. 

But it is as a nobly original man, even more than as 
an original thinker, that Lessing is precious to us, and 
that he is so considerable in German literature. In a 
higher sense, but in the same kind, he is to Germans 
what Dr. Johnson is to us, — admirable for what he was. 
Like Johnson's, too, but still from a loftier plane, a great 
deal of his thought has a direct bearing on the immedi- 
ate life and interests of men. His genius was not a St. 
Elmo's fire, as it so often is with mere poets, — as it 
was in Shelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame 
about the points of his thought, — but was interfused 
with his whole nature and made a part of his very be- 
ing. To the Germans, with their weak nerve of senti- 
mentalism, his brave common-sense is a far wholesomer 
tonic than the cynicism of Heine, which is, after all, 
only sentimentalism soured. His jealousy for maintain- 
ing the just boundaries whether of art or speculation 
may warn them to check with timely dikes the tendency 
of their thought to diffuse inundation. Their fondness 
in cesthetic discussion for a nomenclature subtile enough 
to split a hair at which even a Thomist would have de- 
spaired, is rebuked by the clear simplicity of his style.* 

* Nothing can be drollei- than the occasional translation by Visclier 
of a sentence of Lessing into his own jargou. 



LESSING. 347 

But he is no exclusive property of Germany. As a com- 
plete man, constant, generous, full of honest courage, 
as a hardy follower of Thought wherever she might lead 
him, above all, as a confessor of that Truth which is 
forever revealing itself to the seeker, and is the more 
loved because never wholly revealable, he is an ennobling 
possession of mankind. Let his own striking words 
characterize him : — 

" Not the truth of which any one is, or supposes him- 
self to be, possessed, but the upright endeavor he has 
made to arrive at truth, makes the worth of the man. 
For not by the possession, but by the investigation, of 
truth are his powers expanded, wherein alone his ever- 
growing perfection consists. Possession makes us easy, 
indolent, proud. 

" If God held all truth shut in his right hand, and in 
his left nothing but the ever-restless instinct for truth, 
though with the condition of for ever and ever erring, 
and should say to me. Choose ! I should bow humbly to 
his left hand, and say, Father, give ! pure truth is for 
Thee alone ! " 

It is not without reason that fame is awarded only 
after death. The dust-cloud of notoriety which follows 
and envelopes the men who drive with the wind bewil- 
ders contemporary judgment. Lessing, while he lived, 
had little reward for his labor but the satisfaction in- 
herent in all work faithfully done ; the highest, no doubt, 
of which human nature is capable, and yet perhaps not 
so sweet as that sympathy of which the world's praise is 
but an index. But if to perpetuate herself beyond the 
grave in healthy and ennobling influences be the noblest 
aspiration of the mind, and its fruition the only reward 
she would have deemed worthy of herself, then is Lessing 
to be counted thrice fortunate. Every year since he 
was laid prematurely in the earth has seen his power 



348 LESSING. 

for good increase, and made him more precious to the 
hearts and intellects of men. " Lessing," said Goethe, 
" would have declined the lofty title of a Genius ; but 
his enduring influence testifies against himself On the 
other hand, we have in literature other and indeed im- 
portant names of men who, while they lived, were es- 
teemed gi-eat geniuses, hut whose influence ended with 
their lives, and who, accordingly, were less than they and 
others thought. For, as I have said, there is no genius 
without a productive power that continues forever opera- 
tive." * 

* Eckermarm, Gesprache mit Goethe, III. 229. 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIIENTALISTS* 



" We have had the great professor and founder of the 
philosophy of Vanity in England. As I had good op- 
portunities of knowing his proceedings almost from day 
to day, he left no doubt in my mind that he entertained 
no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his 
understanding but vanity ; with this vice he was pos- 
sessed to a degree little short of madness. Benevolence 
to the whole species, and want of feeling for every indi- 
vidual with whom the professors come in contact, form 
the character of the new philosophy. Setting up for an 
unsocial independence, this their hero of vanity refuses 
the just price of common labor, as well as the tribute 
which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, 
honors the giver and the receiver, and then pleads his 
beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with 
tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest 
relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, 
as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his dis- 
gustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of 
foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young ; 
but bears are not philosophers." 

This was Burke's opinion of the only contemporary 

* Histoire des Idees Morales et Politiques en France au XVIII""^ 
Siccle. Par M. Julks Barni, Professeur a TAcad^mie de Geneve. 
TomeH. Paris. 1867. 



350 ROUSSEAU AXD THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

who can be said to rival him in fervid and sustained elo- 
quence, to surpass him in gi'ace and persuasiveness of 
style. Perhaps we should have been more thankful to 
him if he had left us instead a record of those " proceed- 
ings almost from day to day " which he had such " good 
opportunities of knowing," but it probably never entered 
his head that posterity might care as much about the 
doings of the citizen of Geneva as about the sayings of 
even a British Right Honorable. Vanity eludes recogni- 
tion by its victims in more shapes, and more pleasing, 
than any other passion, and perhaps had Mr. Bm-ke been 
able imaginatively to translate Swiss Jean Jacqiies into 
Irish Edmund, he would have found no juster equivalent 
for the obnoxious trisyllable than " righteous self-esteem." 
For Burke was himself also, in the subtler sense of the 
word, a sentimentalist, that is, a man who took what 
would now be called an aesthetic view of morals and poli- 
tics. No man who ever wrote English, except perhaj^s 
Mr. Ruskin, more habitually mistook his own personal 
likes and dislikes, tastes and distastes, for general prin- 
ciples, and this, it may be suspected, is the secret of all 
merely eloquent writing. He hints at madness as an 
explanation of Rousseau, and it is curious enough that 
Mr. Buckle was fain to explain him in the same way. It 
is not, we confess, a solution that we find very satisfac- 
tory in this latter case. Burke's fury against the French 
Revolution was nothing more than was natural to a des- 
perate man in self-defence. It was his own life, or, at 
least, all that made life dear to him, that was in dan- 
ger. He had all that abstract political wisdom which 
may be naturally secreted by a magnanimous nature 
and a sensitive temperament, absolutely none of that 
rough-and-tumble kind which is so needful for the con- 
duct of affairs. Fastidiousness is only another form of 
egotism ; and all men who know not where to look for 



truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own 
image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are 
seeking. Burke's hatred of Rousseau was genuine and 
instinctive. It was so genuine and so instinctive as no 
hatred can be but that of self, of our own weaknesses as 
we see them in another man. But there was also some- 
thing deeper in it than this. There was mixed with it 
the natural dread in the political diviner of the political 
logician, — in the empirical, of the theoretic statesman. 
Biu'ke, confounding the idea of society with the form of 
it then existing, would have preserved that as the only 
specific against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming that so- 
ciety as it then existed was but another name for anar- 
chy, would have reconstituted it on an ideal basis. The 
one has left behind him some of the profoundest aphor- 
isms of political wisdom ; the other, some of the clearest 
principles of political science. The one, clinging to Di- 
vine right, found in the fact that things were, a reason 
that they ought to be ; the other, aiming to solve the 
problem of the Divine order, would deduce from that ab- 
straction alone the claim of anything to be at all. There 
seems a mere oppugnancy of nature between the two, 
and yet both were, in different ways, the dupes of their 
own imaginations. 

Now let us hear the opinion of a philosopher who was 
a bear, whether bears be philosophers or not. Boswell 
had a genuine relish for what was superior in any way, 
from genius to claret, and of course he did not let Rous- 
seau escape him. " One evening at the Mitre, Johnson 
said sarcastically to me, ' It seems, sir, 3'ou have kept 
very good company abroad, — Rousseau and Wilkes ! ' 
I answered with a smile, ' My dear sir, you don't call 
Rousseau bad company ; do you reallj^ think him a bad 
man*?' Johnson. 'Sir, if you are talking jestingly of 
this, I don't talk with you. If you mean to be serious, 



352 EOUSSEAU AND THE SENTmENTALISTS. 



I think him one of the worst of men, a rascal who ought to 
be hunted out of society, as he has been. Three or four 
nations have expelled him, and it is a shame that he is 
protected in this country. Rousseau, sir, is a very bad 
man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his transpor- 
tation, than that of any felon who has gone from the 
Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have 
him work in the plantations.' " We were the plantations 
then, and Rousseau was destined to work there in an- 
other and much more wonderful fashion than the gruff 
old Ursa Major imagined. However, there is always a 
refreshing heartiness in liis growl, a masculine bass with 
no snarl in it. The Doctor's logic is of that fine old 
crusted Port sort, the native manufacture of the British 
conservative mind. Three or four nations have, there- 
fore England ought. A few 3"ears later, had the Doctor 
been living, if three or four nations had treated their 
kings as France did hers, would he have thought the 
e7'(/o a ver}' stringent one for England 1 

Mr. Burke, who could speak with studied respect of 
the Prince of Wales, and of his vices with that charity 
which thinketh no evil and can afford to think no evil 
of so important a hving member of the British Constitu- 
tion, surely could have had no immixed moral repugnance 
for Rousseau's "disgustful amours." It was because 
they were his that they were so loathsome. Mr. Biu'ke 
was a snob, though an inspired one. Dr. Johnson, the 
friend of that wretchedest of lewd fellows, Richard Sav- 
age, and of that gay man about town, Topham Bean- 
clerk, — himself sprung from an amour that would have 
been disgustful had it not been royal, — must also have 
folt something more in respect of Rousseau than the 
mere repugnance of virtue for vice. We must sometimes 
allow to personal temperament its right of peremptory 
challenge. Johnson had not that fine sensitiveness to 



3 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 353 

the political atmosphere which made Burke presageful 
of coming tempest, but both of them felt that there was 
something dangerous in this man. Their dislike has in 
it somewhat of the enei^gy of fear. Neither of them had 
the same feeling toward Voltaire, the man of supreme 
talent, but both felt that what Rousseau was possessed by 
was genius, with its terrible force either to attract or 
repel. 

" By the pricking of my thumbs, 
Something wicked this way comes." 

Burke and Johnson were both of them sincere men, 
both of them men of character as well as of intellectual 
force ; and we cite their opinions of Rousseau with the 
respect which is due to an honest conviction which has 
apparent grounds for its adoption, whether we agree with 
it or no. But it strikes us as a little singular that one 
whose life was so full of moral incoiisistenc}^, whose char- 
acter is so contemptible in many ways, in some we 
might almost say so revolting, should yet have exercised 
so deep and lasting an influence, and on minds so various, 
should still be an object of minute and earnest discus- 
sion, — that he should Jiave had such vigor in his intel- 
lectual loins as to have been the father of Chateaubriand, 
Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, and many more in liter- 
ature, in politics of Jefferson and Thomas Paine, — that ^ 
the spots he had haunted should draw pilgrims so unlike j 
as Gibbon and Napoleon, nay, should draw them still, 
after the lapse of near a century. Surely there must 
have been a basis of sincerity in this man seldom 
matched, if it can prevail against so many reasons for 
repugnance, aversion, and even disgust. He could not 
have been the mere sentimentalist and rhetorician for 
which the rough-and-ready understanding would at first 
glance be inclined to condemn him. In a certain sense 
he was both of these, but he was something more. It 

— w 



354 EOUSSEAU A^T) THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

will bring us a little nearer the point we are aiming at if 
we quote one other and more recent English opinion of 
him. 

Mr. Thomas Moore, returning pleasantly in a travel- 
ling-carriage from a trip to Italy, in which he had never 
forgotten the poetical shop at home, but had carefully 
noted down all the pretty images that occm-red to him 
for future use, — Mr. Thomas Moore, on his way back 
from a visit to his noble friend Byron, at Venice, who 
had there been leading a life so gross as to be talked 
about, even amid the crash of Napoleon's fall, and who 
was just writing " Don Juan " for the improvement of 
the world, — Mr. Thomas Moore, fresh from the read- 
ing of Byron's Memoirs, which were so scandalous that, 
by some hocus-pocus, three thousand guineas afterward 
found their way into his own pocket for consenting to 
suppress them, — Mr. Thonias Moore, the ci-devant friend 
of the Prince Regent, and the author of Little's Poems, 
among other objects of pilgrimage visits Les CharmetteSj 
where Rousseau had lived with Madame de Wareus. So 
good an opportunity for occasional verses was not to be 
lost, so good a text for a little virtuous moralizing not 
to be thrown away ; and accordingly Mr. Moore pours 
out several pages of octosyllabic disgust at the sensual- 
ity of the dead man of genius. There was no horror 
for Bj'ron. Toward him all was suavity and decorous 
hieiiseance. That lively sense of benefits to be received 
made the Irish Anacreon wink with both his little eyes. 
In the judgment of a liberal like Mr. Moore, were not 
the errors of a lord excusable 1 But with poor Rousseau 
the case was very different. The son of a watchmaker, an 
outcast from bo3'hood up, always on the perilous edge of 
poverty, — what right had he to indulge himself in any 
immoralities ? So it is always with the sentimentalists. 
It is never the thing in itself that is bad or good, but 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 355 

the thing in its relation to some conventional and mostly 

selfish standard. Moore could be a moralist, in this 

case, without any trouble, and with the advantage of 

winning Lord Lansdowne's approval; he could write 

some gi-aceful verses which everybody would buy, and 

for the rest it is not hard to be a stoic in eight-syllable 

measure and a travelling-carriage. The next dinner at 

Bowood will taste none the worse. Accordingly he 

speaks of 

" The mire, the strife 
And vanities of this man's hfe, 
Who more than all that e'er have glowed 
With fancy's flame (and it was his 
In fullest Avarmth and radiance) showed 
What an impostor Genius is; 
How, with that strong mimetic art 
Which forms its life and soul, it takes 
All shapes of thought, all hues of heart, 
Nor feels itself one throb it wakes? 
How, like a gem, its light may shine, 
O'er the dark path by mortals trod, 
Itself as mean a worm the while 
As crawls at midnight o'er the sod; 

How, with the pencil hardly dry 

From coloring up such scenes of love 

And beauty as make young hearts sigh, 

And dream and think through heaven they rove," &c., &c. 

Very spirited, is it not 1 One has only to overlook a 
little threadbareness in the similes, and it is very good 
oratorical verse. But would we believe in it, we must 
never read Mr. Moore's own journal, and find out how 
thin a piece of veneering his own life was, — how he 
lived in sham till his very nature had become subdued 
to it, till he could persuade himself that a sham could 
be written into a reality, and actually made experiment 
thereof in his Diary. 

One verse in this diatribe deserves a special com- 
ment, — 

" What an impostor Genius is ! "_ 



II 



356- ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

In two respects there is nothing to be objected to in it. I 
It is of eight syllables, and " is " rhymes unexception- 
ably with "his." But is there the least filament of 
truth in it '? We venture to assert, not the least. It 
■was not Rousseau's genius that was an impostor. It was 
the one thing in him that was always true. We grant 
that, in allowing that a man has genius. Talent is that 
which is in a man's power ; genius is that in whose 
power a man is. That is the very diflference between ■ 
them. We might turn the tables on Moore, the man of 
talent, and say truly enough. What an impostor talent is ! 
Moore talks of the mimetic power with a total misappre- 
hension of what it really is. The mimetic power had 
nothing whatever to do with the affair. Rousseau had 
none of it ; Shakespeare had it in excess ; but what dif- 
ference would it make in our judgment of Hamlet or 
Othello if a manuscrijDt of Shakespeare's memoirs should 
turn up, and we should find out that he had been a piti- 
ful fellow^ 1 None in the world ; for he is not a professed 
moralist, and his life does not give the waiTant to his 
words. But if Demosthenes, after all his Philippics, 
throws away his shield o.nd runs, we feel the contempti- 
bleness of the contradiction. With genius itself we 
never find any fault. It would be an over-nicety that 
would do that. We do not get invited to nectar and 
ambrosia so often that we think of grumbling and say- 
ing we have better at home. No ; the same genius that 
mastered him who wrote the poem masters us in reading 
it, and we care for nothing outside the poem itself. How ■ 
the author lived, what he wore, how he looked, — all 
that is mere gossip, about which we need not trouble 
ourselves. Whatever he was or did, somehow or other 
God let him l^e worthy to write this, and that is enough 
for us. We forgive everything to the genius ; we are 
inexorable to the man. Shakespeare^ Goethe, Burns, — • 



I 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 357 

wliat have tlieir biographies to do with us 1 Genius is 
not a question of character. It may be sordid, like the 
lamp of Aladdin, in its externals ; what care we, while 
the touch of it builds palaces for us, makes us rich as 
only men in dream-land are rich, and lords to the utmost 
bound of imagination 1 So, when people talk of the 
imgratefal way in which the world treats its geniuses, 
they speak unwisely. There is no work of genius which 
has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius 
to which the human heart and soul have not, sooner or 
later, responded. But the man whom the genius takes 
possession of for its pen, for its trowel, for its pencil, for 
its chisel, him the world treats according to his deserts. 
Does Burns drink 1 It sets him to gauging casks of gin. 
For, remember, it is not to the practical world that the 
genius appeals ; it is the practical world which judges of 
the man's fitness for its uses, and has a right so to judge. 
No amount of patronage could have made distilled liq- 
uors less toothsome to Robbie Burns, as no amount of 
them could make a Burns of the Ettrick Shepherd. 

There is an old story in the Gesta Ro7ncuio7'um of a 
priest who was found fault with by one of his parish- 
ioners because his life was in painful discordance with 
his teaching. So one day he takes his critic out to a 
stream, and, giving him to drink of it, asks him if he 
does not find it sweet and pure water. The parishioner, 
having answered that it was, is taken to the source, and 
finds that what had so refreshed him flowed from be- 
tween the jaws of a dead dog. " Let this teach thee," 
said the priest, " that the very best doctrine may take 
its rise in a very impure and disgustful spring, and that 
excellent morals may be taught by a man who has no 
morals at all." It is easy enough to see the fallacy here. 
Had the man known beforehand from what a carrion 
fountain-head the streo^m issued, he could not have 



358 ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALTSTS. 

drunk of it without loathing. Had the priest merely 
bidden him to look at the stream and see how beautiful 
it was, instead of tasting it, it w^ould have been quite 
another matter. And this is precisely the difference be- 
tween what appeals to our sesthetic and to our moral 
sense, between what is judged of by the taste and the 
conscience. 

It is when the sentimentalist turns preacher of morals 
that we investigate his character, and are justified in so 
doing. He may express as many and as delicate shades 
of feeling as he likes, — for this the sensibility of his 
organization perfectly fits him, no other person could do 
it so well, — but the moment he undertakes to establish 
his feeling as a rule of conduct, we ask at once how far 
are his own life and deed in accordance with what he 
preaches? For every man feels instinctively that all 
the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a 
single lovely action ; and that while tenderness of feeling 
and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of 
temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will 
and a quality of the life. Fine words, says our homely 
old proverb, butter no parsnips ; and if the question be f j 
how to render those vegetables palatable, an ounce of 
butter would be worth more than all the orations of 
Cicero. The only conclusive evidence of a man's sin- 
cerity is that he give himself for a principle. Words, 
money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give 
away ; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and 
practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, 
has taken possession of him. From that sincerity his 
words gain the force and pertinency of deeds, and hia 
money is no longer the pale drudge 'twixt man and man, 
but, by a beautiful magic, what erewhile bore the image 
and superscription of Ccesar seems now to bear the image 
and superscription of God, It is thus that there is a 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 359 

genius for goodness, for magnanimity, for self-sacrifice, 
as well as for creative art ; and it is thus that by a more 
refined sort of Platonism the Infinite Beauty dwells in 
and shapes to its own likeness the soul w^hich gives it 
body and individuality. But when Moore charges genius 
with being an impostor, the confusion of his ideas is piti- 
able. There is nothing so true, so sincere, so downright 
and forthright, as genius. It is always truer than the 
man himself is, greater than he. If Shakespeare the 
man had been as marvellous a creature as the genius 
that wrote his plays, that genius so comprehensive in its 
intelligence, so wise even In its play, that its clowns are 
moralists and philosophers, so penetrative that a single 
one of its phrases reveals to us the secret of our own 
character, would his contemporaries have left us so 
wholly w^ithout record of him as they have done, distin- 
guishing him in no wise from his fellow-players 1 

Rousseau, no doubt, was weak, nay, more than that, 
was sometimes despicable, but yet is not fairly to be 
reckoned among the herd of sentimentalists. It is 
shocking that a man whose preaching made it fashion- 
able for women of rank to nurse their own children 
should have sent his own, as soon as born, to the found- 
ling hospital, still more shocking that, in a note to his 
Discours sur VInegalite, he should speak of this crime 
as one of the consequences of our social system. But 
for all that there was a faith and an ardor of conviction 
in him that distinguish him from most of the writers of 
his time. Nor were his practice and his preaching al- 
w^ays inconsistent. He contrived to pay regularly, what- 
ever his own circumstances were, a pension of one hun- 
dred livres a year to a maternal aunt who had been kind 
to him in childhood. Nor was his asceticism a sham. 
He might have turned his gift into laced coats and 
chdteaux as easily as Voltaire, had he not held it too 



3G0 ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

sacred to be bartered away in any sucli losing ex- 
change. 

But what is worthy of especial remark is this, — that 
in nearly all that he wrote his leading object was the 
good of his kind, and that through all the vicissitudes 
of a life which illness, sensibility of temperament, and 
the approaches of insanity rendered wretched, — the as- 
sociate of infidels, the foundling child, as it were, of an 
age without belief, least of all in itself, — he professed 
and evidently felt deeply a faith in the goodness both of 
man and of God. There is no such thing as scoffing in 
his writings. On the other hand, there is no stereotyped 
morality. He does not ignore the existence of scepti- 
cism ; he recognizes its existence in his own nature, 
meets it frankly face to face, and makes it confess that 
there are things in the teaching of Christ that are 
deeper than its doubt. The influence of his early edu- 
cation at Geneva is apparent here. An intellect so acute 
as his, trained in the school of Calvin in a republic where 
theological discussion was as much the amusement of 
the people as the opera was at Paris, could not fiiil to be 
a good logician. He had the fortitude to follow his logio 
wherever it led him. If the very impressibility of char- 
acter which quickened his perception of the beauties of 
nature, and made him alive to the charm of music and 
musical expression, prevented him from being in the 
highest sense an original writer, and if his ideas were 
mostly suggested to him by books, yet the clearness, con- 
sccutiveness, and eloquence with which he stated and 
enforced them made them his own. There was at least 
that original fire in him which could fuse them and run 
them in a novel mould. His power lay in this very 
ability of manipulating the thoughts of others. Fond 
of paradox he doubtless was, but he had a way of put- 
tino- thinfj;s that arrested attention and excited thought. 



EOUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 361 

t 

It was, perhaps, this very sensibility of the snrround= 
ing atmosphere of feeling and speculation, which mad^ 
Roiisseau more directly influential on contemporary 
thought (or perhaps we should say sentiment) than any 
writer of his time. And this is rarely consistent with 
enduring greatness in literature. It forces us to remem- 
ber, against our will, the oratorical character of his 
works. They were all pleas, and he a great advocate, 
with Europe in the jury-box. Enthusiasm begets enthu- 
siasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment, 
but it is only by truth to nature and the everlasting in- 
tuitions of mankind that those abiding influences are 
w^on that enlarge from generation to generation. Rous- 
seau was in many resi:)ects — as great pleaders always 
are — a man of the day, who must needs become a 
mere name to posteritj^, yet he could not but have had 
in him some not inconsiderable share of that principle 
by which man eternizes himself For it is only to such 
that the night cometh not in which no man shall work, 
and he is still operative both in politics and literature 
by the principles he formulated or the emotions to which 
he gave a voice so piercing and so sympathetic. 

In judging Rousseau, it w^ould be unfair not to take 
note of the malr.rious atmosphere in which he grew up. 
The constitution of his mind w^as thus early infected 
with a feverish taint that made him shiveringly sensi- 
tive to a temperature w^hich hardier natures found bra- 
cing. To him this rough world was but too literally a 
rack. Good-humored Mother Nature commonly imbeds 
the nerves of her children in a padding of self-conceit 
that serves as a buffer against the ordinary shocks to 
which even a life of routine is liable, and it would seem 
at first sight as if Rousseau had been better cared for 
than usual in this regard. But as his self-conceit was 
enormous, so was the reaction from it proportionate, 
16 



362 KOUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

and the fretting suspiciousness of temper, sure mark of 
an unsound mind, which rendered him incapable of inti- 
mate friendshij), while passionately longing for it, became 
inevitably, when turned inward, a tormenting self-dis- 
trust. To dwell in unrealities is the doom of the senti- 
mentalist ; but it should not be forgotten that the same 
fitful intensity of emotion which makes them real as the 
means of elation, gives them substance also for tortui'e. 
Too irritably jealous to endure the rude society of men, 
he steeped his senses in the enervating incense that 
women are only too ready to burn. If their friendship 
be a safeguard to the other sex, their homage is fatal to 
all but the strongest, and Rousseau was weak both by in- 
heritance and early training. His father was one of 
those feeble creatures for whom a fine phrase could always 
satisfactorily fill the void that non-performance leaves 
behind it. If he neglected duty, he made up for it by 
that cultivation of the finer sentiments of our common 
nature which waters flowers of speech with the brineless 
tears of a flabby remorse, without one fibre of resolve in 
it, and which impoverishes the character in projDortion as 
it enriches the vocabulary. He was a very Apicius in. 
that digestible kind of woe which makes no man leaner, 
and had a favorite receipt for cooking you up a sorrow cb 
la douleur massouvie that had just enough delicious sharp- 
ness in it to bring tears into the eyes by tickling the pal- 
ate. '' When he said to me, ' Jean Jacques, let us speak 
of thy mother,' I said to him, ' Well, father, we are going 
to weep, then,' and this word alone drew tears from him. 
* Ah ! ' said he, groaning, ' give her back to me, console 
me for her, fill the void she has left in my soul ! ' " 
Alas ! in such cases, the void she leaves is only that she 
found. The grief that seeks any other than its own 
society will erelong want an object. This admirable 
parent allowed his son to become an outcast at sixteen, 



EOUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 363 

without any attempt to reclaim him, in order to enjoy 
unmolested a petty inheritance to which the boy was 
entitled in right of his mother. " This conduct," Rous- 
seau tells us, " of a father whose tenderness and virtue 
were so well known to me, caused me to make reflections 
on myself which have not a little contributed to make 
my heart sound. I drew from it this great maxim of 
morals, the only one perhaps serviceable in practice, to 
avoid situations which put our duties in opposition to 
our interest, and which show us our own advantage in 
the wrong of another, sure that in such situations, how- 
ever sincere may he one's love of virtue, it sooner or later 
grows weak without our perceiving it, and that we become 
unjust and wicked in action without having ceased to he 
just and good in soid.^^ 

This maxim may do for that " fugitive and cloistered 
virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies 
out and seeks its adversar}^," which Milton could not 
praise, — that is, for a manhood whose distinction it is 
not to be manly, — but it is chiefly worth notice as be- 
ing the characteristic doctrine of sentimentalism. This 
disjoining of deed from will, of practice from theory, is 
to put asunder what God has joined by an indissoluble 
sacrament. The soul must be tainted before the action 
become corrupt ; and there is no self-delusion niore fatal 
than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the 
anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is grovelling 
and sensual, — witness Coleridge. In his case we feel 
something like disgust. But where, as in his son Hart- 
ley, there is hereditary infirmity, where the man sees 
the principle that might rescue him slip from the clutch 
of a nerveless will, like a rope through the fingers of a 
drowning man, and the confession of faith is the moan 
of despair, there is room for no harsher feeling than pity, 
Rousseau showed through life a singular proneness for 



364 ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

being convinced by his own eloquence ; he was always 
his own first convert ; and this reconciles his power as a 
"Writer with his weakness as a man. He and all like him 
mistake emotion for conviction, velleity for resolve, the 
brief eddy of sentiment for the midcurrent of ever- 
gathering faith in dnty that draws to itself all the 
affluents of conscience and will, and gives continuity 
of purpose to life. They are like men who love the 
stimulus of being under conviction, as it is called, who, 
forever getting religion, never get capital enough to 
retire upon and spend for their own need and the com- 
mon service. 

The sentimentalist is the spiritual hypochondriac, 
with whom fancies become facts, while facts are a dis- 
comfort because they will not be evaporated into fancy. 
In his eyes. Theory is too fine a dame to confess even a 
country-cousinship with coarse-handed Practice, whose 
homely ways would disconcert her artificial world. The 
very susceptibility that makes him quick to feel, makes 
him also incapable of deep and durable feeling. He 
loves to think he suffers, and keeps a pet soitow, a blue- 
devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere, like Para- 
celsus's black dog. He takes good care, however, that 
it shall not be the true sulphurous article that sometimes 
takes a fancy to fly away with his conjurer. Rene says : 
" In my madness I had gone so far as even to wish I 
might experience a misfortune, so that my suffering 
might at least have a real object." But no ; selfishness 
is only active egotism, and there is nothing and nobodj^ 
wdth a single exception, which this sort of creature will 
not sacrifice, rather than give any other than an imagi- 
nary pang to his idol. Vicarious pain he is not unwill- 
ing to endure, nay, will even commit suicide by proxy, 
like the German poet who let his wife kill herself to give 
him a sensation. Had young Jerusalem been anything 



ROUSSEAU AND THE' SENTIMENTALISTS. 365 

like Goethe's portrait of him in Werther, he would have 
taken very good care not to blow out the brains which 
he would have thought only too precious. Real sorrows 
are uncomfortable things, but purely aesthetic ones are 
by no means unpleasant, and I have always fancied 
the handsome young Wolfgang writing those distracted 
letters to Auguste Stolberg with a looking-glass in front 
of him to give back an image of his desolation, and finding- 
it rather pleasant than otherwise to shed the tear of 
sympathy with self that would seem so bitter to his fair 
correspondent. The tears that have real salt in them 
will keep ; they are the difficult, manly tears that are 
shed in secret ; but the pathos soon evaporates from 
that fresh-water with which a man can bedew a dead 
donkey in jDublic, while his wife is having a good cry 
over his neglect of her at home. We do not think the 
worse of Goethe for hypothetically desolating himself 
in the fashion aforesaid, for with many constitutions 
it is as purely natural a crisis as dentition, which the 
stronger worry through, and turn out very sensible, 
agreeable fellows. But where there is an arrest of de- 
velopment, and the heartbreak of the patient is audibly 
prolonged through life, we have a spectacle which the 
toughest heart would wish to get as far away from as 
possible. 

We would not be supposed to overlook the distinction, 
too often lost sight of, between sentimentalism and sen- 
timent, the latter being a very excellent thing in its way, 
as genuine things are apt to be. Sentiment is intellec- 
tualized emotion, emotion precipitated, as it were, in 
pretty crystals by the fancy. This is the delightful sta- 
ple of the poets of social life like Horace and Beranger, 
or Thackeray, when he too rarely played with verse. It 
puts into words for us that decorous average of feeling 
to the expression of which society can consent without 



3G6 EOUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

danger of being indiscreetly moved. It is excellent for 
people who are willing to save their souls alive to any 
extent that shall not be discomposing. It is even satis- 
fying till some deeper experience has given us a hunger 
which what we so glibly call " the world " cannot sate, 
just as a water-ice is nourishment enough to a man who 
has had his dinner. It is the sufficing lyrical interjDreter 
of those lighter hours that should make part of every 
healthy man's day, and is noxious only when it palls 
men's appetite for the truly profound poetry which is 
very passion of very soul sobered by afterthought and 
embodied in eternal types by imagination. True senti- 
ment is emotion ripened by a slow ferment of the mind 
and qualified to an agreeable temperance by that taste 
which is the conscience of polite society. But the senti- 
mentalist always insists on taking his emotion neat, and, 
as his sense gradually deadens to the stimulus, increases 
his dose till he ends in a kind of moral deliquium. At 
first the debaucher, he becomes at last the victim of his 
sensations. 

Among the ancients we find no trace of sentimental- 
ism. Their masculine mood both of body and mind left 
no room for it, and hence the bracing quality of their 
literature comj^ared with that of recent times, its tonic 
property, that seems almost too astringent to palates re- 
laxed by a daintier diet. The first great example of the 
degenerate modern tendency was Petrarch, who may be 
said to have given it impulse and direction. A more 
perfect specimen of the type has not since appeared. 
An intellectual voluptuary, a moral dilettante, the first 
instance of that character, since too common, the gen- 
tleman in search of a sensation, seeking a solitude at 
Yaucluse because it made him more likely to be in de- 
mand at Avignon, praising philosophic poverty with a 
sharp eye to the next rich benefice in the gift of his 



O I'i^ 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. oG7 

patron, commending a good life but careful first of a 
good living, hapj)y only in seclusion but making a dan- 
gerous journey to enjoy the theatrical show of a corona- 
tion in the Capitol, cherishing a fruitless passion which 
broke his heart three or four times a year and yet could 
not make an end of him till he had reached the ripe age 
of seventy and survived his mistress a quarter of a cen- 
tury, — surely a more exquisite perfection of inconsis- 
tency would be hard to find. 

When Petrarch returned from his journey into the 
North of Europe in 1332, he balanced the books of his 
unrequited passion, and, finding that he had now been 
in love seven years, thought the time had at last come 
to call deliberately on Death. Had Death taken him at 
his word, he would have protested that he was only in 
fun. For we find him always taking good care of an ex- 
cellent constitution, avoiding the plague with commend- 
able assiduity, and in the very year when he declares it 
absolutely essential to his peace of mind to die for good 
and all, taking refuge in the fortress of Capranica, from 
a wholesome dread of having his throat cut by robbers. 
There is such a difference between dying in a sonnet 
with a cambric handkerchief at one's eyes, and the pro- 
saic reality of demise certified in the parish register ! 
Practically it is inconvenient to be dead. Among other 
things, it puts an end to the manufacture of sonnets. 
But there seems to have been an excellent understanding 
between Petrarch and Death, for he was brought to that 
grisly monarch's door so often, that, otherwise, nothing 
short of a miracle or the nine lives of that aninipJ whom 
love also makes lyrical could have saved him. " I con- 
sent," he cries, "to live and die in Africa among its 
serpents, upon Caucasus, or Atlas, if, while I live, to 
breathe a pure air, and after my death a little corner 
of earth where to bestow my body, may be allowed me. 



368 ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

This is all I ask, but this I cannot obtain. Doomed al- 
ways to wander, and to be a stranger everywhere, 
Fortune, Fortune, fix me at last to some one spot ! I 
do not covet thy favors. Let me enjoy a tranquil pov- 
erty, let me pass in this retreat the few daj^s that remain 
to me ! " The pathetic stop of Petrarch's poetical organ 
was one he could pull out at pleasure, — and indeed we 
soon learn to distrust literary tears, as the cheap subter- 
fuge for want of real feeling with natures of this qual- 
ity. Solitude with him was but the pseudonyme of no- 
toriety. Poverty was the archdeaconry of Parma, with 
other ecclesiastical pickings. During his retreat at Vau- 
cluse, in the very height of that divine sonneteering love 
of Laura, of that sensitive purity which called Avignon 
Babylon, and rebuked the sinfulness of Clement, he was 
himself begetting that kind of children which we spell 
with a b. We believe that, if Messer Francesco had been 
present when the woman was taken in adultery, he 
would have flung the first stone without the slightest 
feeling of inconsistency, nay, with a sublime sense of 
virtue. The truth is, that it made very little difference 
to him what sort of proper sentiment he expressed, pro- 
vided he could do it elegantly and with imction. 

Would any one feel the difference between his faint 
abstractions and the Platonism of a powerful nature 
fitted alike for the withdrawal of ideal contemj)lation 
and for breasting the storms of life, — would any one 
know how wide a depth divides a noble friendship based 
on sympathy of pursuit and aspiration, on that mutual 
help which souls capable of self-sustainment are the 
readiest to give or to take, and a simulated passion, true 
neither to the spiritual nor the sensual part of man, — 
let him compare the sonnets of Petrarch with those which 
Michel Angelo addressed to Yittoria Colonna. In them 
the airiest pinnacles of sentiment and speculation are but- 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 369 

tressed with solid mason-work of thought, and of an 
actual, not fancied experience, and the depth of feeling 
is measured by the sobriety and reserve of expression, 
while in Petrarch's all ingenuousness is frittered away 
into ingenuity. Both are cold, but the coldness of the 
one is self-restraint, while the other chills with pretence 
of warmth. In Michel Angelo's, you feel the great 
architect ; in Petrarch's the artist who can best realize 
his conception in the limits of a cherry-stone. And yet 
this man influenced literature longer and more widely 
than almost any other in modern times. So gi-eat is 
the charm of elegance, so unreal is the larger part of 
what is written ! 

Certainly I do not mean to say that a work of art 
should be looked at by the light of the artist's biogi'a- 
phy, or measm'ed by our standard of his character. Nor 
do I reckon w^hat was genuine in Petrarch — his love 
of letters, his refinement, his skill in the superficial 
graces of language, that rhetorical art by w^hich the 
music of words supplants their meaning, and the verse 
moulds the thought instead of being plastic to it — 
after any such fashion. I have no ambition for that 
character of valet de chamhre which is said to disenchant 
the most heroic figures into mere every-day personages, 
for it implies a mean soul no less than a servile condi- 
tion. But we have a right to demand a certain amount 
of reality, however small, in the emotion of a man who 
makes it his business to endeavor at exciting our own. 
We have a privilege of nature to shiver before a painted 
flame, how cunningly soever the colors be laid on. Yet 
our love of minute biographical detail, our desire to 
make ourselves spies upon the men of the past, seems 
so much of an instinct in us, that we must look for the 
spring of it in human nature, and that somewhat deeper 
than mere curiosity or love of gossip. It should seem 
16* X 



370 KOUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

to arise from what must be considered on the whole a 
creditable feeling, namely, that we value character more 
than any amount of talent, — the skill to he something, 
above that of doing anything but the best of its kind. 
The highest creative genius, and that only, is privileged 
from arrest by this personality, for there the thing pro- 
duced is altogether disengaged from the producer. But 
in natures incapable of this escape from themselves, the 
author is inevitably mixed with his work, and we have 
a feeling that the amount of his sterling character is 
the security for the notes he issues. Especially we feel 
so w^hen truth to self, which is always self-forgetfid, and 
not truth to nature, makes an essential part of the value 
of what is offered us ; as where a man undertakes to 
narrate personal experience or to enforce a dogma. This 
is particularly true as respects sentimentalists, because 
of their intrusive self-consciousness ; for there is no more 
universal characteristic of human nature than the in- 
stinct of men to apologize to themselves for themselves, 
and to justify personal failings by generalizing them into 
universal laws. A man would be the keenest devil's 
advocate against himself, were it not that he has always 
taken a retaining fee for the defence ; for we think that 
the indirect and mostly unconscious pleas in abatement 
which we read between the lines in the works of many 
authors are oftener written to set themselves right in 
their own eyes than in those of the world. And in the 
real life of the sentimentalist it is the same. He is un- 
der the wretched necessity of keeping up, at least in 
public, the character he has assumed, till he at last 
reaches that last shift of bankrupt self-respect, to play 
the hypocrite with himself Lamartine, after passing 
round the hat in Europe and America, takes to his bed 
from wounded pride when the French Senate votes him 
a subsidy, and sheds tears of humiliation. Ideally, he 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 371 

resents it ; in practical coin, he will accept the shame 
without a wry face. 

George Sand, speaking of Kousseau's "Confessions," 
says that an autobiographer always makes himself the 
hero of his own novel, and cannot help idealizing, even 
if he would. But the weak point of all sentimentalists 
is that they always have been, and always continue un- 
der every conceivable circumstance to be, their own 
ideals, whether they are writing their own lives or no. 
Rousseau opens his book with the statement: "I am not 
made like any of those I have seen ; I venture to believe 
myself unlike any that exists. If I am not worth more, 
at least I am different." exquisite cunning of self- 
flattery ! It is this very imagined difference that makes 
us worth more in our own foolish sight. For while all 
men are apt to think, or to persuade themselves that 
they think, all other men their accomplices in vice or 
weakness, they are not difficult of belief that they are 
singular in any quality or talent on which they hug 
themselves. More than this ; people who are truly 
original are the last to find it out, for the moment we 
become conscious of a virtue it has left us or is getting 
ready to go. Originality does not consist in a fidgety 
assertion of selfhood, but in the faculty of getting rid 
of it altogether, that the truer genius of the man, which 
commerces with universal nature and with other souls 
through a common sympathy with that, may take aU 
his powers wholly to itself, — and the truly original 
man could no more be jealous of his peculiar gift, than 
the grass could take credit to itself for being green. 
What is the reason that all children are geniuses, 
(though they contrive so soon to outgrow that dan- 
gerous quality,) except that they never cross-examine 
themselves on the subject] The moment that process 
begins, their speech loses its gift of unexpectedness, 



372 EOUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

and they become as tediously impertinent as the rest 
of us. 

If there never was any one like him, if he constituted 
a genus in himself, to what end write confessions in 
which no other human being could ever be in a condi- 
tion to take the least possible interest '? All men are 
interested in Montaigne in proportion as all men find 
more of themselves in him, and all men see but one 
image in the glass which the gTeatest of poets holds up 
to nature, an image which at once startles and charms 
them with its familiarity. Fabulists always endow their 
animals with the passions and desires of men. But if 
an ox could dictate his confessions, what glimmer of un- 
derstanding should we find in those bovine confidences, 
unless on some theory of pre-existence, some blank mis- 
giving of a creature moving about in worlds not realized 1 
The truth is, that we recognize the common humanity 
of Rousseau in the very weakness that betrayed him into 
this conceit of himself; we find he is just like the rest 
of us in this very assumption of essential difference, for 
among all animals man is the only one who tries to pass 
for more than he is, and so involves himself in the con- 
demnation of seeming less. 

But it would be sheer waste of time to hunt Rousseau 
through all his doublings of inconsistency, and rim him 
to earth in every new paradox. His first two books at- 
tacked, one of them literature, and the other society. 
But this did not prevent him from being diligent with 
his pen, nor from availing himself of his credit with per- 
sons who enjoyed all the advantages of that inequality 
whose evils he had so pointedly exposed. Indeed, it is 
curious how little practical communism there has been, 
how few professors it has had who would not have gained 
by a general dividend. It is perhaps no frantic effort of 
generosity in a philosopher with ten crowns in his pocket 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 373 

when he offers to make common stock with a neighbor 
who has ten thousand of yearly income, nor is it an un- 
common thing to see such theories knocked clean out of 
a man's head by the descent of a thumping legacy. 
But, consistent or not, Rousseau remains permanently 
interesting as the highest and most perfect type of the 
sentimentalist of genius. His was perhaps the acutest 
mind that was ever mated with an organization so dis- 
eased, the brain most far-reaching in speculation that 
ever kept itself steady and worked out its problems amid 
such disordered tumidt of the nerves.* His letter to the 
Archbishop of Paris, admirable for its lucid power and 
soberness of tone, and his Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques, 
which no man can read and believe him to have been 
sane, show him to us in his strength and weakness, 
and give us a more charitable, let us hope therefore a 
truer, notion of him than his own apology for himself 
That he was a man of genius appears unmistakably in 
his impressibihty by the deeper meaning of the epoch in 
which he lived. Before an eruption, clouds steeped 
through and through with electric life gather over the 
crater, as if in sympathy and expectation. As the 
mountain heaves and cracks, these vapory masses are 
seamed with fire, as if they felt and answered the dumb 
agony that is struggling foi* utterance below. Just such 
flashes of eager sympathetic fire break continually from 
the cloudy volumes of Rousseau, the result at once and 
the warning of that convulsion of which Paris was to be 
the crater and all Europe to feel the spasm. There are 
symptoms enough elsewhere of that want of faith in the 
existing order which made the Revolution inevitable, — 
even so shallow an observer as Horace Walpole could 
forebode it so early as 1765, — but Rousseau more than 
all others is the unconscious expression of the gi'oping 
* Perliaps we should except Newton. 



374 ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

after something radically new, the instinct for a change 
that should be organic and pervade every fibre of the 
social and political bod}^ Freedom of thought owes far 
more to the jester Voltaire, who also had his solid kernel 
of earnest, than to the sombre Genevese, whose earnest- 
ness is of the deadly kind. Yet, for good or evil, the 
latter was the father of modern democracy, and with- 
out him our Declaration of Independence would have 
wanted some of those sentences in which the imme- 
morial longings of the poor and the dreams of soli- 
tary enthusiasts were at last affirmed as axioms in 
the manifesto of a nation, so that all the world might 
hear. 

Though Rousseau, like many other fanatics, had a re- 
markable vein of common sense in him, (witness his 
remarks on duelling, on landscape-gardening, on French 
poetry, and much of his thought on education,) we can- 
not trace many practical results to his teaching, least of 
all in politics. For the great difficulty with his system, 
if system it may be called, is, that, while it professes to 
follow nature, it not only assumes as a starting-point 
that the individual man may be made over again, but 
proceeds to the conclusion that man himself, that human 
nature, must be made over again, and governments re- 
modelled on a purely theoretic basis. But when some- 
thing like an experiment in this direction was made in 
1789, not only did it fail as regarded man in general, but 
even as regards the particular variety of man that in- 
habited France. The Revolution accomplished many 
changes, and beneficent ones, yet it left France peopled, 
not by a new race without traditions, but by French- 
men. Still, there could not but be a wonderful force in 
the words of a man who, above all others, had the secret 
of making abstractions glow with his own fervor ; and 
his ideas — dispersed now in the atmosphere of thought 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 375 

— have influenced, perhaps still continue to influence, 
speculative minds, which prefer swift and sure generali- 
zation to hesitating and doubtful experience. 

Rousseau has, in one respect, been utterly misrepre- 
sented and misunderstood. Even Chateaubriand most 
unfilially classes him and Voltaire together. It appears 
to me that the inmost core of his being was religious. 
Had he remained in the Catholic Church he might have 
been a saint. Had he come earlier, he might have 
founded an order. His was precisely the nature on 
which religious enthusiasm takes the strongest hold, — a 
temperament which finds a sensuous delight in spiritual 
things, and satisfies its craving for excitement with 
celestial debauch. He had not the iron temper of a 
great reformer and organizer like Knox, who, true Scotch- 
man that he was, found a way to weld this world and 
the other together in a cast-iron creed ; but he had as 
much as any man ever had that gift of a great preacher 
to make the oratorical fervor which persuades himself 
while it lasts into the abiding conviction of his hearers. 
That very persuasion of his that the soul could remain 
pure while the life was corrupt, is not unexampled among 
men who have left holier names than he. His " Con- 
fessions," also, would assign him to that class with whom 
the religious sentiment is strong, and the moral nature 
weak. They are apt to believe that they may, as special 
pleaders say, confess and avoid. Hawthorne has admi- 
rably illustrated this in the penance of Mr. Dimmesdale. 
With all the soil that is upon Rousseau, I cannot help 
looking on him as one capable bej^ond any in his genera- 
tion of being divinely possessed ; and if it happened 
otherwise, when we remember the much that hindered 
and the little that helped in a life and time like his, we 
shall be much readier to pity than to condemn. It was 
his very fitness for being something better that makes 



376 ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

him able to shock us so with what in too many respects 
he unhappily was. Less gifted, he had been less hardly 
judged. More than any other of the sentimentalists, 
except possibly Sterne, he had in him a staple of sincer- 
ity. Compared with Chateaubriand, he is honesty, com- 
pared with Lamartine, he is manliness itself. His near- 
est congener in our own tongue is Cowper. 

In the whole school there is a sickly taint. The 
strongest mark which Rousseau has left upon literature 
is a sensibility to the picturesque in Nature, not with 
Nature as a strengthener and consoler, a wholesome 
tonic for a mind ill at ease with itself, but with Nature 
as a kind of feminine echo to the mood, flattering it 
with sympathy rather than correcting it with rebuke or 
lifting it away from its unmanly depression, as in the 
wholesomer fellow-feeling of Wordsworth. They seek 
in her an accessary, and not a reproof. It is less a sym- 
pathy with Nature than a sympathy with ourselves as 
we compel her to reflect us. It is solitude, Nature for 
her estrangement from man, not for her companionship 
with him, — it is desolation and ruin. Nature as she has 
triumphed over man, — with which this order of mind 
seeks communion and in which it finds solace. It is 
with the hostile and destructive power of matter, and 
not with the spirit of life and renewal that dwells in it, 
that they ally themselves. And in human character it 
is the same. St. Preux, Rene, Werther, Manfred, Quasi- 
modo, they are all anomalies, distortions, ruins, — so 
much easier is it to caricature life from our own sickly 
conception of it, than to paint it in its noble simplicity ; 
so much cheaper is unreality than truth. 

Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, — the 
one trivial and ordinary, the other sacred and recluse ; 
one which he carries to society and the dinner-table, the 
[ other in which his youth and aspiration survive for him, 



EOUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 377 

and which is a confidence between himself and God. 
Both may be equally sincere, and there need be no con- 
tradiction between them, an}^ more than in a healthy man 
between soul and body. If the higher life be real and 
earnest, its result, whether in literature or affairs, will 
be real and earnest too. But no man can produce great 
things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with 
himself, who would not exchange the finest show for the 
poorest reality, who does not so love his work that he is 
not only glad to give himself for it, but finds rather a 
gain than a sacrifice in the surrender. The sentimental- 
ist does not think of what he does so much as of what 
the world will think of what he does. He translates 
shoidd into would, looks upon the spheres of duty and 
beauty as alien to each other, and can never learn how 
life rounds itself to a noble completeness between these 
two opposite but mutually sustaining poles of what we 
long for and what we must. 

Did Rousseau, then, lead a life of this quality 1 Per- 
haps, when we consider the contrast which every man 
who looks backward must feel between the life he planned 
and the life which circumstance within him and without 
him has made for him, we should rather ask. Was this 
the life he meant to lead 1 Perhaps, when we take into 
account his faculty of self-deception, — it may be no 
greater than our own, — we should ask, Was this the 
life he believed he led 1 Have we any right to judge 
this man after our blunt English fashion, and condemn 
him, as we are wont to do, on the finding of a jury of 
average householders 1 Is French reality precisely our 
reality 1 Could we tolerate tragedy in rhymed alexan- 
drines, instead of blank verse 1 The whole life of Eous- 
seau is pitched on this heroic key, and for the most 
trivial occasion he must be ready with the sublime senti- 
ments that are supposed to suit him rather than it. It 



378 ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

is one of the most curious features of the sentimental 
ailment, that, while it shuns the contact of men, it 
courts publicity. In proportion as solitude and com- 
munion with self lead the sentimentalist to exaggerate 
the importance of his own personality, he comes to 
think that the least event connected with it is of conse- 
quence to his fellow-men. If he change his shirt, he 
would have mankind aware of it. Victor Hugo, the 
greatest living representative of the class, considers it 
necessary to let the world know by letter from time 
to time his opinions on every conceivable subject about 
which it is not asked nor is of the least value unless 
we concede to him an immediate inspiration. We 
men of colder blood, in whom self-consciousness takes 
the form of pride, and who have deified mauvaise horde 
as if our defect were our virtue, find it especially hard 
to understand that artistic impulse of more southern 
races to pose themselves properly on every occasion, and 
not even to die without some tribute of deference to the 
taste of the world they are leaving. Was not even 
mighty Csesar's last thought of his drapery? Let us 
not condemn Rousseau for what seems to us the inde- 
cent exposure of himself in his "Confessions." 

Those who allow an oratorical and purely conventional 
side disconnected with our private understanding of the 
fiicts, and with life, in which everything has a wholly 
parliamentary sense where truth is made subservient to 
the momentary exigencies of eloquence, should be chari- 
table to Rousseau. While we encourage a distinction 
which establishes two kinds of truth, one for the world, 
and another for the conscience, while we take pleasure in 
a kind of speech that has no relation to the real thought 
of speaker or hearer, but to the rostrum only, we must 
not be hasty to condemn a sentimentalism which we do 
our best to foster. We listen in public with the gi'avity 



il 



ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 379 

Oi augurs to what we smile at when we meet a brother 
adept. France is the native land of eulogy, of truth 
padded out to the size and shape demanded by comme-il- 
faut. The French Academy has, perhaps, done more 
harm by the vogue it has given to this style, than it has 
done good by its literary purism ; for the best purity of 
a language depends on the limpidity of its source in 
veracity of thought. Rousseau was in many respects a 
typical Frenchman, and it is not to be wondered at if he 
too often fell in with the fashion of saying what was ex- 
pected of him, and what he thought due to the situation, 
rather than what would have been true to his inmost 
consciousness. Perhaps we should allow something also 
to the influence of a Calvinistic training, which certainly 
helps men who have the least natural tendency towards 
it to set faith above works, and to persuade themselves 
of the efficacy of an inward grace to offset an outward 
and visible defection from it. 

As the sentimentalist always takes a fanciful, some- 
times an unreal, life for an ideal one, it would be too 
much to say that Rousseau was a man of earnest convic- 
tions. But he was a man of fitfully intense ones, as 
suited so mobile a temperament, and his writings, more 
than those of any other of his tribe, carry with them 
that persuasion that was in him while he wrote. In 
them at least he is as consistent as a man who admits 
new ideas can ever be. The children of his brain he 
never abandoned, but clung to them with paternal fidel- 
ity. Intellectually he was true and fearless ; constitu- 
tionally, timid, contradictory, and weak ; but never, if 
we understand him rightly, false. He was a little too 
credulous of sonorous sentiment, but he was never, like 
Chateaubriand or Lamartine, the lackey of fine phrases. 
If, as some fanciful physiologists have assumed, there 
be a masculine and feminine lobe of the brain, it would 



380 TvOUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 

seem that in men of sentimental turn the masculine half 
fell in love with and made an idol of the other, obeying 
and admiring all the pretty whims of this folk du logis. 
In Rousseau the mistress had some noble elements of 
character, and less taint of the demi-monde than is visi- 
ble in more recent cases of the same illicit relation. 



THE END 



Cambridge : Printed bv Welch, Bigelow, and Company. 



rintea by weicn 

3i^77-6 



